Innovation in the NHS and beyond

Dr Rachna Chowla [pictured], Joint Director Clinical Strategy, King’s Health Partners, shares her reflections and those of contributors, following a successful event hosted by The Health Innovation Network, King’s Health Partners, and INSEAD Healthcare Management Initiative - Innovation in the NHS and beyond.

At its most simple, innovation in healthcare is critical to delivering better outcomes for patients in the population we serve. Previously I was happy to accept that innovation dictates the pace and scale of change as it translates scientific development into direct benefits for people, but COVID-19 and the reflections from other speakers brought that into question.

Throughout our inaugural partnership event, Innovation in the NHS and beyond, we discussed the power of collaboration and how it is vital to health outcomes and systems. We heard about the advancements we can make in healthcare when academic and health partners support, in a true sense of partnership, initiatives that lead to improvements in healthcare in our community.

In his keynote address, Professor Ian Abbs, CEO Guy’s and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust (NHS FT), emphasised that industries – travel and banking for example – have innovated by shifting the control from the hands of the provider to the consumer. He suggests our ability to do this is not hampered by our lack of imagination or invention but by an innovation deficit – despite best efforts we lack rapid adoption and spread models to enable people to take control of their own healthcare. Our focus, he concluded, must be on empowering communities with the trust and the networks improve and deliver care.

Building trust

It was this core message of trust – running as a golden thread throughout all our speakers’ presentations – which resonated. Our experts highlighted the need to build – and rebuild - trust in healthcare by ensuring people and their families are properly part of decision-making, inspire confidence in the public that our health system will work on big, challenging problems such as health inequality in mental and physical health. We heard encouraging examples where trust in data and information sharing has led to rapid-scale delivery – particularly throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

It was powerful to be reminded how individual experiences of healthcare can have a huge impact, for example when the Co-Founder of Isla Care, Peter Hansell, told us about how his family’s experience of the NHS while growing up has helped to create a fundamental shift in how the Isla Care supports NHS clinicians with the right data to provide greater context for decision making.

Community insight

Nadine Fontaine-Palmer, Founder and Director of Mabadiliko CIC, emphasised the importance of amplifying the voices of the seldom-listened-to, to ensure community insight drives health innovation, which in turn improves the outcomes that matter to people.

Trust, Nadine said, is one of the biggest barriers in terms of access, engagement, and outcomes in health. Mabadaliko works to transforming the conversation between the public and health system to effectively reduce health inequalities. This begins, Nadine suggests, by understanding the causes of reduced trust – ‘you cannot expect the community to change if you don’t change [within the system]’.

The event provided an opportunity for us to consider how innovation enables people to make choices about where, when, and how they receive support and how effective leadership and management in healthcare has the potential to help people to deliver frontline healthcare around the world while encouraging entrepreneurial spirit and scaling.

I continue to be persuaded that, as Steven Covey says, change happens at the speed of trust, but I would add that, perhaps innovation happens at the speed of trust too.

I would like to reiterate my thanks to all our speakers and delegates, who we have invited to share their thoughts and reflections.

Polly Bishop, Interim CIO at South East London Integrated Care Board, said:

We heard initially how slow some aspects of our healthcare delivery model are slow to change through the illustration of the patient patients waiting in outpatients to be seen today, just as several years ago. However, I shared a contrasting view on how rapidly the digital ecosystem developing and being adopted by patients through examples such as the huge increase in the number of repeat prescriptions requested through the NHS app and the growing usage of the London Care Record by healthcare professionals.

We have learned how these digital systems positively impact healthcare outcomes such as by enabling a reduction in urgent admission to hospital from care homes due to appropriate use of shared care plans and records. Drivers for change include national support for enabling people to have access to information and data to be able to manage their own health and care – just as they have the financial information to be able to manage their finances.

In order for change to healthcare delivery models to succeed, we will need strong governance – of programmes, services, and data – to support the development and adoption of strong secure resilient ecosystems.  We have seen how a single issue with these systems can reduce the trust of our clinicians and population – this trust is critical for change to progress.

Dr Neel Basudev, GP Principal Springfield Medical Centre, Clinical Director Diabetes Health Innovation Network - South London AHSN and Out of Hospital Lead for London Diabetes Clinical Network reflects on Professor Ian Abbs’ use of a single outpatient chair to illustrate how our system has remained largely undisrupted since 1860. He said:

My main reflection was around the outpatient chair and story of innovation or lack of it. It strikes me that more often than not, we innovate and bring new ideas, but the basic problem remains. Therefore, what we are effectively doing is more like pruning and tidying on the surface rather than necessary deep-rooted change.

This means that when looking at innovation, we should ask ourselves what is fundamentally different about the new service or pathway. Change at any level also takes an incredibly long time to embed and so making changes to things that are deep rooted will take longer one would imagine.

Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network, said:  

The event was a great opportunity to reflect on the fantastic collaborations which are driving the discovery, development, and deployment of innovations across London, showing the important roles of patients, clinicians, academics, companies, investors, and many others.

I particularly enjoyed hearing about the journey that diabetes services have been on over the last 10 years, with the combinations of different innovations needed to solve challenges as different points in the pathway – and how they have all come together to transform services.

Find out more about our event Innovation in the NHS and Beyond and our speakers here.

If you are interested in finding out more, please email kingshealthpartners@kcl.ac.uk