Blogs

Working in the health and care system can be hugely challenging but is often incredibly rewarding, with the decisions you make on a day-to-day basis often directly impacting the lives of patients, carers and their families. This brings huge responsibility but also a sense of privilege and the ability to make what feels like a meaningful contribution through your vocation.

Of course there’s also a personal interest in making sure that NHS and social care services are the best they can be – as we and our families are all patients and service users to some degree during our lifetime. I have been lucky enough to enjoy a varied career in the NHS spanning Public Health, commissioning and service transformation; working directly with clinicians and NHS staff to improve health outcomes and streamline service delivery to provide the best value, in the right place, at the right time for patients.

Today the fundamentals of LfE are being showcased by the East Midlands Patient Safety Collaborative at a national patient safety event. LfE is all about studying excellence in healthcare and creating new opportunities for learning and improving resilience and staff morale. On the LfE website, there are a number of blogs and there is an update from the most recent conference where practitioners shared their learning.

Blogs are written to help us consume information in short bite seize chunks, but here is a challenge, how can we hope to understand such a complex system as healthcare and patient safety learning with the reading of a blog or two? The concepts involved in this complexity require us to have deep knowledge about; systems thinking, the model for improvement and various frameworks from implementation science to get close to that deep understanding. It takes time and a specialist focus as this blog will address.

Improving patients’ experience of care and reducing costs to the NHS are central to EMAHSN’s clinical programmes. Our Scarred Liver project is delivering on both of these; improving outcomes through identifying people at risk of liver disease earlier whilst averting the on-costs of care and treatment.

Working in partnership with the NIHR Nottingham Digestive Diseases Centre BRC, we have supported the roll out of an innovative diagnostic pathway and the use of the mobile Fibroscan® device. This initiative is being led by Professor Neil Guha and his team, and is proven to more effectively detect chronic liver disease at an early stage.

To celebrate the 30 years of The Association of British HealthTech industries (ABHI) they have published a collection of 30 opinion pieces from health tech industry leaders.

Read Mike Hannay's contribution which covers the impact of Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNS) and their critical role as the innovation arm for the NHS.

This year has seen some important milestones for England’s 15 Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs), which were set up by the NHS in 2013 to drive the uptake of health innovation and support economic growth.

Well, yes and no....

10 million of us live in areas that are considered “rural” – which can be defined as a small village, an open countryside, a coastal community, former mining areas or commuter villages on the edge of towns and cities.

Living in the rural idyll that it is all peace and quiet, can draw envious assumptions and observations that suggest affluence and good health but it is not without its challenges. A 2017 Local Government Association report titled ‘Health and wellbeing in rural areas’ suggests that the high-level statistics that lend support to these assumptions mask the pockets of deprivation and poor health outcomes that exist in most rural communities.

A key part of the vision for a tech driven NHS launched by Matt Hancock (Secretary of State for Health and Care), is a standards based approach to enable and support the changes required to deliver the vision.
NHS Digital have wasted no time and have launched the ‘NHS digital, data and technology standards framework’.

The framework has been designated as ‘Beta’ and is out for open consultation which will conclude this calendar year. Is this pace a signal of the level of intent to make progress in what has been historically a very tricky area for the NHS?

On October 17th 2018, the Secretary of State for Health, Matt Hancock, launched 'The Future of Healthcare - our vision for digital, data and technology in healthcare'. This sets the vision for how modern technology can be used to provide digital services that meet the needs of the health and care workforce and the people who are users of care services.

Since then most of the focus has been around the technology architecture standards that will be developed and mandated to support the vision and the impact this might have on existing suppliers.

England’s 15 Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs) were set up by the NHS in 2013 to drive the uptake of health innovation and support economic growth.

We were relicensed this year to operate as the key innovation arm of the NHS, and one of the main ways we do this is by creating the conditions for collaboration between the NHS and industry.

The UK is home to some of the world’s best MedTech and digital entrepreneurs and the AHSNs are helping unlock the game-changing potential of innovation to transform health services – improving patient outcomes, driving down the cost of care and generating economic growth and investment.

With this in mind, we operate a wide range of initiatives to support SMEs - and one of these is our new Digital Health Accelerator programme.

In my preparation to organise events designed to spread some evidence-based ideas that affect safety culture in a positive way, themes such as:

EMAHSN recognises the value of its own medicines optimisation programme, and nationally, as it became part of the deliverables for the second five year licence period from May 2018. I was delighted to be part of the recruitment panel to select a Pharmacist to lead and work collaboratively with the 14 other Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs), to develop, share and spread good practice in medicines optimisation. 
So what is Medicines Optimisation and why should we be interested in it?