Challenges around transformation in Healthcare

The challenge of making innovation happen in the NHS

Matt Whitty, Director at NHS England and NHS Improvement, gave examples where innovative approaches had been taken to solve problems within the NHS. A stand-out example was the use of drones to deliver Chemotherapy medicine between sites, significantly reducing transportation times.

There is a clear need to get innovations to patients faster.

One approach to help make this happen comes from focussing on priority areas as defined within the Core20PLUS5 strategy. This is an approach to reduce health inequalities within the most deprived 20% of the population who are members of specific minority groups.  It focuses on improving 5 key clinical areas; Maternity, Severe Mental Illness, Chronic Respiratory Disease, Early Cancer diagnosis and Hypertension.

The NHS had also invested in making it easier for external innovators to bring their ideas into the NHS. It’s a process that currently takes too long, up to 10 years for some suppliers.

To help address this, the AHSN Network supports innovators by helping to match their innovations with the parts of the NHS that are most likely to benefit from them. Their role is to accelerate the spread of promising and impactful innovations in the NHS. This helps to shortcut the process, and they help to refine and improve the innovators’ ideas, acting a bit like a medical version of Dragon’s Den.

The challenge of building effective teams to make transformation happen

The question of how to build effective teams to do digital health transformation was explored in a session with James Freed, Anne Marie Cunningham, Joanna Fox and John O’Connell.The panel explored the question ‘What is a digital team?’ and explained the importance of adopting a ‘digital mindset’ where teams focussed on small, incremental delivery of work based on learnings from user research. They emphasised the  importance of teams having flat non-hierarchical structures,along with teams being self-organising to allow them to make decisions quickly.

A useful tip came from a discussion about helping a new team to settle and navigate the usual forming, storming and norming cycles.

By simply asking your new team members ‘what can you do?’ you help build the boundaries of what people can and can’t do and get a quick understanding of skills gaps within your team.

One key skill was the ability to hack bureaucracy. You need people who can navigate the bureaucracy of the organisation to help to make change happen.

Transformation skills are in short supply, and the panel highlighted that everyone was short of staff and finding recruitment challenging. One solution to this was to be brave when tackling skills gaps, to deliberately map out career development pathways for internal staff to bring them on and to develop from within.

The panel discussed the interesting trend of clinical staff moving into digital jobs due to clinicians realising that the way to make changes is to move into digital roles. This reminded me of the UX Healthcare workshop we ran earlier this year which explored the question of ‘How might we help clinicians to think like service designers?’ – perhaps one approach to address skills shortages in this area?

Building effective teams is clearly challenging. One resource the panel recommended as ‘the bible’ was Digital Transformation at Scale: Why the Strategy Is Delivery which they often turned to for both advice and guidance.