By Paul Llewellyn, Subject Matter Expert and Clinical Lead, Connected Solutions.
The NHS is in my DNA. My mother was a nurse for 40 years, nine of her sisters were nurses, my brother is a paramedic and I qualified as a nurse in 1996. Collectively we have served the NHS for just over 320 years.
It’s fair to say that the NHS is something that we’re all proud of. Recently it has experienced significant pressures and makes headline news on a daily basis. There are many views on the causes but there’s a general agreement that a growing and ageing population is contributing to the mounting pressure on both NHS and social care services.
As we age so the risk of developing a chronic condition increases. According to Department of Health figures, 58 per cent of people over 60 have a long term condition, compared to 14 per cent under 40. And managing those conditions is expensive. Diabetes UK states that the direct NHS spend on diabetes management is around £25,000 per minute or ten per cent of the overall NHS budget. That’s just one of many conditions with a rising prevalence and future predictions show that this trend will continue.
More funding is often called for to plug the gap. But money alone cannot sustain the NHS for future generations. The way healthcare is delivered needs to fundamentally change.
Technology is a powerful catalyst for change and is heralded as the driving force in creating a modern and sustainable NHS. Telehealth and telecare have been around for years but we’ve seen little uptake in the UK. This is in spite of the Department of Health commissioned randomised controlled trial producing some impressive findings and the 3 Million Lives programme that aimed to get three million people with LTC’s and/or social care needs benefiting from using telehealth and telecare.
We now see the launch of the Technology Enabled Care Services (TECS) resource pack for commissioners.
The TECS programme shares much of the vision of its predecessors but has less emphasis on government targets and more focus on encouraging the adoption of innovation at the grass roots. Innovation funds have been launched to support this, including the Nursing Technology Fund, Integrated Technology Fund and the Prime Ministers Challenge fund setting aside hundreds of millions of pounds. The response has been a positive one. I have witnessed a changing mood amongst clinicians with a greater openness to what new and emerging technology can offer.
At BT, we’ve welcomed this call to action and are active in our support of the programme because we believe technology can help improve health and social care delivery.
When the 3 Million Lives programme was launched, the iPhone had not been launched. Although the iPad seems to have been around forever, you couldn’t purchase one in the UK until April 2010. The smartphone has opened up numerous opportunities and is now the device of choice for the BT telehealth solution. The peripherals used to support home monitoring are growing at pace and they are becoming sleeker and cheaper. As with the electronic care record revolution of the past decade, I’m beginning to feel that there is no going back.
In my view TECS is about more than just technology. Numerous telehealth implementations have failed to realise benefits because they have not changed existing care pathways. Telehealth tends to be perceived as a burden and clinical buy-in has been affected. Our approach is to use the technology to redesign existing care pathways to improve care for patients, professionals and the organisations responsible. We believe that this is critical to the successful delivery of telehealth at scale and, far from being a burden, will free up local resources.
The recently published NHS Five Year Forward View calls for new mechanisms for accelerating the quicker adoption of cost-effective innovation. TECS supports this by providing commissioners across both health and social care with the tools to engage in a meaningful way. I’m keen to begin that journey and demonstrate how we can support organisations to deliver improved clinical outcomes for patients.
Paul Llewellyn — Subject Matter Expert and Clinical Lead, Connected Solutions.
Member of the NHS England TECS Implementation Group.
The TECS programme has produced practical tools to commission, procure, implement and evaluate technology-enabled care services. This resource can be found on the TECS website.
You’ve read Paul’s thoughts on TECS, so why not hear Rob Brougham’s (BT Director of Telehealth and Telecare) thoughts on how our experience can be applied to your own challenges.
