TeleTracking Technologies, Inc. vice-president and former pediatric specialist surgeon, Dr. Julia Fishman, discusses how technology can help meet the challenge of delivering change in the NHS.
We can’t hide from the huge financial challenge facing the NHS. The well-documented numbers are staggering – productivity improvements are needed immediately to meet a predicted £30bn annual funding gap by 2021. To put this into perspective, £30bn would pay for over 130,000 nurses, which accounted for 35% of England’s nursing workforce in 2014.
In times of such austerity, hospital providers are looking at transformation programmes that can include drastic measures such as reducing staff numbers and selling land to create desperately needed savings. This approach requires hospital managers to perform a constant balancing act to ensure that any organisational cutbacks do not impact the quality of patient care. Savings in one area can have a detrimental impact on another; resources to support care provision need to be agile, responsive, and cover more than one care setting, especially as we move to more integrated care.