Lessons for the Left Shift: Bob Klaber on Bridging the Gap
In a recent article for the Healthcare Financial Management Association’s Healthcare Finance magazine, Dr Bob Klaber, consultant paediatrician and co-founder of Connecting Care for Children, shared powerful insights with Richard Gardham on the urgent need to shift care out of hospitals and into communities.
Reflecting on over 15 years of experience, including the early moments that inspired Connecting Care for Children, Bob highlighted the human and system-level costs of fragmented care. The NHS, he argues, remains too divided both structurally and culturally, with ‘professional tribes’ often working in silos rather than collaboration.
His message is clear: real progress will come not just from moving budgets, but from changing behaviours. Instead of pushing patients through a complex and disjointed system, we should be enabling neighbourhood teams to pull in the specialist support they need from across primary, secondary, and community services.
To NHS colleagues, especially those working in finance, Bob’s call is to be “super curious” and to lean into partnership. Collaborative, compassionate ways of working aren’t just better for clinicians; they’re essential for delivering better outcomes for children, families, and communities.
As he puts it, “We need everyone in the NHS to big up other people in the NHS, and indeed across the wider care sector.”
You can read the full article in Healthcare Finance magazine here (June 2025 edition).
