A little reflection will make anyone who tries to predict the future of healthcare nervous. After all, who could have said anything in early 2020 that turned out to be in any way accurate about the year to come! I do have the advantage of having...
Amazon had revenues of $280 billion in 2019- not bad for an online bookshop founded in 1994. According to McKinsey [1], 35% of what Amazon customers buy comes from recommendations generated by the company’s algorithms. Netflix, another company founded at a similar time, has revenues...
Much of the focus on serious incident investigations is on the “How?”. People give a lot of thought to the processes, policies and procedures around investigations – not to mention to the filling in of template documents. The focus is on getting the job done. In...
Technology is everywhere reshaping our lives. Former Health Secretary Stephen Dorrell, however, believes that healthcare is lagging behind this trend. Writing in the foreword to a new report[1] on the benefits of Technology-Enabled Care Services published by PPP (Public Policy Projects, a think-tank), Dorrell says...
Amid the mass of uncertainty, we can all agree that Covid-19 has driven home the importance of digital technology. This is certainly true of the NHS, where technology has become embedded at a rate that previously seemed impossible. But, while Covid-19 is on everyone’s minds, the...
COVID-19, as the disease is known, has created a formidable workload for our healthcare system over the last couple of months, whether it is building the NHS Nightingale Hospitals, re-organising acute hospitals or building new apps to track the spread of the disease. Many healthcare...
A new year and a new decade find many NHS trusts facing the same problems. In January this year the BBC released an article addressing the huge legal fees the NHS faces. The fees are to settle outstanding claims of clinical negligence, once again highlighting...
Jonathan Zito and Christopher Clunis? Mary Povey and Raymond Sinclair? Lin and Megan Russell and Michael Stone? I wouldn’t be surprised if these names didn’t mean anything to you. Why should they? Well, Jonathan, Mary, Lin and Megan were all victims of homicides committed by...
“We are not here to curse the darkness, but to light the candle that can guide us through that darkness to a safe and sane future.” (John F Kennedy, 1960) At its heart patient safety is all about making sure we are continuously learning - not...
Data protection is tricky … even for those with the deepest minds! The Information Commissioner’s ruling in 2017 that the Royal Free Foundation Trust failed to comply with the Data Protection Act when it gave Google access to its patient data must have sent shivers down...