Some interesting points, especially around hospital at hame.
Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid
DIGITAL TRANSFORMATIONWe must not just look to build back better, but to build back smarter, drawing on the brilliant advances that we have made. So many of the announcements that the Prime Minister and I have made in recent weeks – when you think about the delivery of the Elective Recovery Plan, the Integration White Paper, the Social Care White Paper, and the Living with COVID Plan – have had technology at their very core.
These are: firstly, making sure the NHS is set up properly for success; secondly, levelling up across the NHS and social care; thirdly, pursuing personalisation; and fourthly, making big breakthrough bets on emerging technologies and data.
Just as we deploy the most exciting new technologies at scale, we need to get the right foundations in place: the building blocks that make digital transformation possible. We are now in the process of merging NHSX and NHS Digital into NHSE – bringing together all of the NHS’s digital bodies under one roof for the very first time.
Through the smarter use of NHS data and the adoption of emerging technologies we can move services from generalised to personalised.
As part of this we will be developing a clear and frictionless pathway for promising products, underpinned by clear standards to make sure that technology platforms can talk to each other, so we can get them deployed as quickly as possible.
New technologies can also help us to offer more dignified and independent care to people, in their own homes, keeping them out of hospital if they don’t need to be there. With an increasingly ageing population – where nearly one in 7 people is projected to be aged over 75 by 2040 – and more and more comorbidities, technology can do so much to help people to live independent lives and minimise the time they spend in clinical settings. The remote monitoring that played such a starring role during the pandemic gave us a glimpse into what could be done.
They monitored huge numbers of people in their own living rooms, rather than being limited by the capacity of a hospital ward.We have seen the brilliant use of virtual wards throughout this pandemic. Norfolk and Norwich NHS Foundation Trust set up their virtual ward a year ago this month. It’s already
freed up over 6,000 bed days for inpatients – and the initiative has patient satisfaction levels of 99%. I want us to intensify the pace of the rollout of virtual wards so we can make sure that these services are available across the whole country, and we’ve made up to £450 million available over the next 2 years to support this.
