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Is technology killing the NHS?

I'm sorry if this comes across as pessimistic but I believe that the NHS will die unless seriously intelligent reforms are made to it. These reforms will probably not be possible because of inertia in the system. What happened to Stafford Hospital is a snapshot of what will come to other NHS trusts.

When the NHS was established in the 1940s, technology in hospitals was far simpler. In many cases medical procedures were carried out using simple hand tools. The most complicated piece of equipment in a hospital was probably an X-Ray machine. A modern hospital contains tens of thousands of pieces of advanced machinery.

This costs a large amount of money to buy.

This costs a large amount of money to maintain and service.

This costs a large amount of money to provide staff training.

The amount of money spent by hospitals on advanced medical devices and IT equipment keeps increasing year after year and is a substantial part of the NHS budget.

If this isn't bad enough in itself, the NHS is not very good when it comes to using and deploying technology due to its cumbersome and antiquated management structure along with the mentality of a high proportion of its staff. The NHS is clearly not a visionary and progressive organisation.

Only a small fraction of medical devices are specifically designed for the NHS. A high proportion of them are off the shelf products primarily designed for the US healthcare market.

The situation is marginally better with software although NHS IT projects are known to have been expensive disasters.

Therefore, is technology killing the NHS?

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0 Arran Cameron over 5 years ago

Legh Richardson:

Interesting...

There appears to be a very large budget for capital investment but not revenue expenditure.

Therefore its likely to be a lack of investment in the people structure, because there's a policy of removal of the weakest links in the system that can bring the machine to its knees.

The money is there and available but is not being invested appropriately.

Legh

It's well known that sports and music do not follow the usual conventional laws of economics but I'm beginning to wonder if healthcare is also an exception. It's impossible to deny that the NHS is a labour intensive organisation. At the time when it was founded in the 1940s there were many other labour intensive organisations in Britain. Large factories and shipyards employed thousands of workers. Large offices employed thousands of clerks and typists. In the intervening decades technology has slashed the workforce in the commercial and industrial world. Despite the introduction of masses of new technology into the NHS it has done very little to reduce the number of staff employed. This raises the question whether healthcare is largely immune to automation in a way that many other commercial and industrial processes are not. If this is generally true then a situation arises where the NHS ends up simultaneously paying for more new technology and the salaries of a comparable (or even greater) number of staff as each year goes by. A nasty combination for the taxpayer.

If technology could be developed where an NHS hospital can provide exactly the same services with only 50% of the nurses and 75% of the doctors it employs then it creates a moral dilemma. It could be the solution to a funding crisis and save the taxpayer billions but there is also the issue of whether nurses and doctors deserve to be thrown onto the scrapheap of unemployment. Are nurses and doctors any more special than factory and office workers who have lost their jobs due to automation, or should they go down the same avenue?
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0 Arran Cameron over 5 years ago

Legh Richardson:

Interesting...

There appears to be a very large budget for capital investment but not revenue expenditure.

Therefore its likely to be a lack of investment in the people structure, because there's a policy of removal of the weakest links in the system that can bring the machine to its knees.

The money is there and available but is not being invested appropriately.

Legh

It's well known that sports and music do not follow the usual conventional laws of economics but I'm beginning to wonder if healthcare is also an exception. It's impossible to deny that the NHS is a labour intensive organisation. At the time when it was founded in the 1940s there were many other labour intensive organisations in Britain. Large factories and shipyards employed thousands of workers. Large offices employed thousands of clerks and typists. In the intervening decades technology has slashed the workforce in the commercial and industrial world. Despite the introduction of masses of new technology into the NHS it has done very little to reduce the number of staff employed. This raises the question whether healthcare is largely immune to automation in a way that many other commercial and industrial processes are not. If this is generally true then a situation arises where the NHS ends up simultaneously paying for more new technology and the salaries of a comparable (or even greater) number of staff as each year goes by. A nasty combination for the taxpayer.

If technology could be developed where an NHS hospital can provide exactly the same services with only 50% of the nurses and 75% of the doctors it employs then it creates a moral dilemma. It could be the solution to a funding crisis and save the taxpayer billions but there is also the issue of whether nurses and doctors deserve to be thrown onto the scrapheap of unemployment. Are nurses and doctors any more special than factory and office workers who have lost their jobs due to automation, or should they go down the same avenue?
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Is technology killing the NHS?

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