The NHS Workforce Plan: Failure to innovate is also a workforce problem

After the UK government’s publication of the NHS workforce plan, Barbara Harpham, chair of The Medical Technology Group, offers her thoughts on the proposals and the effects for medtech.

There’s no way around it. The NHS is woefully short of staff. The publication of the Government’s workforce plan earlier this month was met with broad approval, perhaps because it saw the Government honestly grappling with the scale and nature of the problem. The health service will need 360,000 more staff over the next 15 years, and a corresponding £2.4 billion investment has been allocated to fulfil its recommendations. 

It is also welcome to see the plan acknowledge the importance of medical technology in the delivery of patient services, improving patient care, and building a more efficient health service.

Making reference to artificial intelligence and robotic assisted surgery, the plan set out the objective to convene an ‘expert group to identify advanced technology that can be used most effectively in the NHS’. It also recognises the need to ensure that the workforce has the right skills to take advantage of these advancements.

However, here is where the report misses a trick. We must not lose sight of the fact that there is a vast array of medical technology that already exists and is ready to be deployed. This technology is approved by NICE and has been proven to deliver better outcomes for patients and a more efficient health service: diagnosing patients quicker, giving them the best available treatment, avoiding readmissions, and supporting patient self-management. Above all it relieves the pressure on clinical staff.

Alongside the workforce report, we should also be asking ourselves: what is the quickest way to scale out this innovation and technology across the workforce? As our recent Rationwatch report demonstrated, some trusts are using technology and innovative pathways that have been proven to reduce hospital appointments and free up clinicians’ time. It is disheartening, then, to learn that we have no serious mechanism for sharing this innovation across the health service, creating a situation where staff in some hospitals are needlessly burnt out, while others are able to prosper thanks to the initiative of localised transformation teams. 

I have previously called for a national strategy to identify and scale out this innovation and technology. The wording of this report touches on this idea, but realistically it does not flesh out such a plan in sufficient depth and accountability. A single executive agency would provide a single pathway that allows medical technology and innovation to be implemented in hospitals. It would overcome the transformation silos that exist in the NHS and work with clinicians and hospital leaders to ensure such technology is implemented at pace and scale.

Of course our health service needs more staff, but this alone is not a solution to the future challenges of the NHS. We need to also start to build a health service that resembles a modern, efficient system we so often dream about. There is an appetite to change, but I’m not yet convinced. All too often ‘innovation’ becomes a talking shop. Globally, the NHS has a poor reputation when it comes to patient access to innovation and technology. We see other health services starting to outpace us, fulfilling the ambition to create preventative, digitised models of care.

If we can recognise that medical technology can also be the solution to some of its workforce problems, then both the political will and logistical detail will start to come to fruition. Innovation, as I am often told, exists by ‘the bucketload’ in the NHS. The problem is access to such innovation. Failure to harness solutions that save clinicians time, make their jobs easier and ensure patients only come to the hospital when they really need to is ultimately a workforce problem too.