Healthcare Roundup

Seven days in the NHS and health IT

Unions may coordinate strike action

Unions are discussing a day of coordinated industrial action on 20 December, The Guardian has reported. The Royal College of Nursing has announced that its members will strike on 15 and 20 December, in locations where a ballot has endorsed it. Unison and the GMB have declared that ambulance workers have also endorsed action, but not yet announced dates. All three unions have suspended ballots in Scotland, where the government has put a better pay offer on the table. UK health and social care secretary Steve Barclay has said action is “in nobody’s best interests” and pay demands are “not affordable” (Daily Mail).

NHS winter crisis: first snapshot not looking good

The NHS is seeing ten times more patients in hospital with flu than it did this time last year, according to the first weekly snapshot of how the health service is doing this winter. The NHS England report suggests that ambulance handover delays are up and so are delayed discharges. National medical director Sir Stephen Powis said the NHS was under “considerable pressure” ahead of “what is likely to be the most challenging winter ever” and the threat of a “tripledemic” of flu, Covid-19, and urgent and emergency service demand is “very real.” He urged people to take up vaccine offers and use NHS 111 online if possible.

System control centres go live

NHS England has announced that 40 healthcare ‘air traffic control centres’ have gone live across England. A news release says the centres will operate seven days a week and their staff will monitor a range of data, including A&E performance, waiting times, staffing levels, ambulance response times, and bed occupancy, to identify emerging challenges, support hospitals under pressure, and divert ambulances if necessary. The move is part of the NHS winter plan that was published in October. Other plans include a national falls response service, respiratory hubs, and additional bed capacity, including beds on virtual wards.

NHS Scotland launches National Digital Platform

The Scottish Government has launched a National Data Platform “to make it simpler to deliver technology that improves the care and wellbeing of people in Scotland.” The platform will deliver infrastructure that will make it easier to deploy and monitor apps and IT solutions, a clinical data repository, standard APIs and a development framework to make it easier for developments to build new ideas “using our style guide and code packages.” The NDP has been designed by NHS Education for Scotland, which says it wants it to work “in the way that mobile phones use an Android or iOS platform.”

GP appointment data published

The government is pushing ahead with the publication of data that it says will improve “transparency” and enhance patient choice. The Department of Health has published waiting times for GP appointments for the first time, detailing how many appointments each practice is delivering and the length of time taken from booking an appointment to attending it. The statistics expand the GP data set that is published monthly on the NHS Digital website. The autumn statement reiterated an expectation that patients will get a GP appointment within two weeks and an urgent appointment the same day.

Funding and accelerator news: from the DHSC, the NHS AI Lab, Health Data Research, Innovate UK, and ABHI

The Department of Health and Social Care has announced that it is adopting a ‘taskforce’ approach, based on the success of the vaccines taskforce during the Covid-19 pandemic, to tackle four challenges: obesity, cancer, mental health, and addiction. The ‘missions’ will look to accelerate the introduction of effective technology in their areas. The NHS AI Lab Skunkworks team has opened a new call for applications from developers who have ideas for how AI can be used to solve problems in health and social care. Successful bidders will get 12 weeks of support from the team to develop a proof of concept (details on the Health Tech Newspaper).

Health Data Research and the National Institute for Health Research have launched a call for three-month projects that can generate rapid insights into research questions, targeted at understanding the risk to health and social care this winter (HTN). Projects start in January. Innovate UK has opened an accelerator programme for SMES who would like to break into the US, via a partnership with bodies in Houston. Successful companies will join a structured entry programme (HTN). Meanwhile, the Association for British HealthTech Industries has led a trade mission to Florida as part of its US Accelerator programme to help companies expand abroad (Health Tech World).

Highland Marketing advisory board: “The NHS digital funding hokey cokey”

Analysis

At its autumn meeting, our panel of NHS IT and industry experts discussed health and care funding against a backdrop of huge political uncertainty. In these circumstances, money for IT programmes is often put into the system only to be clawed back again; and the board considered how this impacts on NHS IT departments and health tech companies alike.