Just by way of introduction and to give some context to my talk this morning, I first met John back at the end of 2014/15 when we were reviewing how we were going to go forward with biomedical device management, not only around maintenance but actually around procurement as well. And so my presentation this morning is in that context. We began the journey back in 2014 and I’m going to bring you forward to where we are now. I appreciate that some of you, you may be where we were back in 2014 and some of you may be well ahead of where we are now and perhaps some are in the middle, but hopefully for all of you there will be something you can take out of what we’ve embraced at the RNOH.
So, very briefly, I’m responsible to our executive directorate for the oversight of outsourced services, and that includes clinical engineering, pathology and a number of other clinical supplementary services, like vascular surgery and cardiology. I oversee the capital and revenue budgets for medical device replacement, and I also oversee the revenue budget for ongoing maintenance and planned periodic maintenance periods. So we are the largest hospital in the UK. That’s the Royal National Orthopaedic Hospital. We are the largest orthopaedic hospital in the UK. We are regarded as a leader in the field of orthopaedics, and we train approximately 20% of the UK’s orthopaedic surgeons. So it is our thing for want of a better term.
Read more: Medical Device Management & Procurement Innovations
First of all, good morning! Let me congratulate John, Ruth and the team on 10 years. It’s a fantastic achievement and it’s grown over the years, and this is the biggest and best exhibition I’ve seen so far, so well done John. So I’m Dal Jdali, I work for Althea. And I’ll be talking about managed services, the efficiencies and benefits of those, and how it affects you and affects the institutions that you work in and what you can do as part of that to help move things along.
We had a lot of questions on our stand and some people saying who’s Althea? So I’m just going to briefly touch on that before I can get into managed services. Althea’s a large group: 3000+ employees, we look after 1.4 million devices, and we’re world leader in multi-vendor independent services. You can read all the different stats, but what it tells you really is we’re a stable, reasonably large company. In the UK, you would have known us as TBS, Asteral, MESA, and these all merged last year to be Althea. In the UK, we’re in 330 healthcare institutions and we have over 300 employees.
When we think of managed services, some of you may remember managed services started off as catering being outsourced from hospitals, and that’s where a lot of that began. But over the last 15 years that’s changed and a lot more healthcare equipment side has moved into various types of managed service models. Why do they do it? Well, technology obsolescence is one of them. Think of all the changes that you’ve seen. We know the NHS was 70 years old last year. Think of all the devices, the technology advancement, all that comes at a price. Think of the costs of MRIs, CT scanners, how’s that going to be funded? So managed services allows those things to be implemented.
I’m Andrew Frost. Just give you a bit of an idea of my background. I started off life as an MDT4 many, many years ago. I’ve worked in the NHS as well as the industry for the main corporates and I am now working for NTS Health. I’ve been working there for 12 years. We’re a consulting company and we specialise as well, and we specialise in providing consulting into new builds, anything from original business case, right the way through procurement, equipping and installation and conditioning. We also get involved in asset management as well. We do quite a bit of asset management consulting. We’ve done quite a lot of work in hospitals across the country, looking at how environmental partners are working and trying to sort of find ways in which to improve their efficiency and the services they’re offering.
So, before I actually start on my presentation, just a little question. I see myself as an enabler and I think NTS Health as sort of enablers. We get heavily involved in design and development of healthcare facilities. The key to that is equipment. So out of interest how many of you here actually are actively involved in design, development, developing services in hospital from the word go? So one, two, three, oh dear, right! One of the problems is that services within healthcare tend to be very siloed. Biomed Departments tend to be on their own, so visibility at high level doesn’t tend to be particularly good, and I think that’s something that needs to change. I think one of the key players in developing services in the healthcare are biomed departments, and I think my little presentation today will help sort of make us see that, and also perhaps give you some enthusiasm to get more involved. I think it’s a tremendous opportunity.
I’m Laura Metcalfe and I’m from NHS Greater Glasgow and Clyde. And I’m here to talk to you today about a customised award we’ve developed in healthcare technology management. Oops sorry I’ve already gone ahead. So in Glasgow we’ve got over 100 technologists working in equipment management and we have 12 of those in active training at the moment. So that would either be employed as a band 5 going through their IPM diploma or employed as a modern apprentice. And one of my roles within this is the training lead for our technologists. And part of that training role also involves a large amount of recruitment. So before I talk about the new qualification I’ll talk about the reasons we’ve needed to develop this qualification.
So what we’ve got here is an age demographic chart for our technologists in equipment management. So what does your demographic chart look like? This is quite a diverse room. I’m quite impressed. I thought there might have been a bit more grey hair in the room, but you look quite well represented. So we do need an age diverse workforce. We need to see people in all categories. And we need to make sure that experience that’s been gained by the older generations is passed on to the younger generations as they come in. You can see that in Glasgow we’re not too badly represented. We’ve got people in most of the age groups. We’ve got our apprentices sitting in that 16 to 20 age group. But you can also see from this chart that when we get to 50 and above that’s where the majority of our workforce is. And that’s about 38% of our workforce. So roughly equates to about 40 members of staff. And that is a problem for us, because over the next ten to 15 years those staff will be leaving. So how do we replace those staff? How do we get the new workforce, that younger generation in to work with us?
Well thank you very much for inviting us here today. My name is Mark Smith and I’m the Business Development Director for Enovacom. But before I do that I wanted to just carry on the theme really of what’s been said today. And that’s all about transformation for you guys. So my experience has been 22 years in healthcare now and I have a lot of passion around the patient actually, and all of us here in this room have all experiences of being in hospitals or being with relatives, and for me there is a collective effort required from everybody that’s involved focused on the patient. And I think as healthcare recognises the value of wholesale digitalisation so the biomedical engineer plays an important part in emerging role of ensuring that real time data is available to clinicians, and to effect a positive patient outcome. And I think that’s a really strong message to send.
It’s not easy for you, and I recognise that, because your world is changing. You know, you need new skills, you need to understand about new devices, and there’s a wealth of new devices and there’s a wealth of new devices coming onto the market. There’s an explosion of these devices and wearables. You need to know how to connect them. You’ll need to know also how to, for instance, send messages or alarms in some way. So it’s a kind of very complex situation. And of course the environment in care is changing as well. So you might actually become mobile. People are being looked after in their own homes, in community hospitals and mental health as well as the acute trusts.
Read more: Medical Devices Integration: break through the barriers
Hello everyone. Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be at the EBME conference. So thank you, John, for the invitation. I've worked for many years now in monitoring both with Welch Allyn, in fact, and then Omron. Now I work for a company called Qardio. And I'm sure you’ve all heard of it? Perhaps not. So let me tell you a bit more about us. So there are many challenges, and we've heard already in Scott's presentation actually before, that data is very much easier, more accessible and there are issues with integration certainly into systems and EPRs. What I'd like to do is look at the main problems the NHS are facing. If we think about the NHS generally, what are the conditions that are really causing big problems?
So I want to talk about stroke. Now, we know stroke is really quite, well, probably the number one issue that we have. And the condition which is one of the major causes of stroke, of course, is atrial fibrillation. So currently in the UK 1.3 million people have AF. Now that is the equivalent of the population of Birmingham. So it's a huge problem. And if you imagine that all those people are potentially at risk of complicated stroke or other complications. That means in the UK every 18 minutes somebody suffers from an AF-related stroke. So a huge issue, it equals about 30,000 people a year. OK. Another problem with AF is that it's, in 80% of the cases, completely asymptomatic. So people don’t have a problem. They wouldn’t necessarily go to primary care because they don’t know. And that’s 80% of them, so they're essentially completely asymptomatic. Cost to the UK, and this is quite considerable, the NHS, £3 billion a year, OK, to look after post-stroke patients, and £4 billion, in fact, loss of productivity. So for the UK as a whole it's an enormous issue.
