WIREDGOV

A new technology innovation centre opened at Great Ormond Street Hospital last week is intended to transform the use of technology including AI in healthcare & improve patient outcomes.

The state-of-the-art unit, called DRIVE – Digital, Research, Informatics and Virtual Environments  – is the first of its kind in the world.  It is both a physical & conceptual unit and is the result of a unique partnership between NHS Digital, Great Ormond Street Hospital, University College London and leading industry experts in technology, artificial intelligence and digital innovation.

The DRIVE unit will be a ‘hot-house’ for exploration activity, a rich environment for our technologists to work alongside industry & academic colleagues, and the launchpad for concepts which can be ‘scaled-up’ within our delivery programs or within regional and local technology programmes across the system.

We see the potential for deployment of cross-sector commodity technology across many different areas of our work.  Our first 3 areas of focus will be:

• The use of commodity integrated-communication technologies to drive collaboration across the system
• Exploring how best to gain from the explosion in ML, NLP and other AI technologies to enable better leverage of the hugely-rich data within the health & care system
• Exploring the use of commodity cloud data management and hosting services from hyper-cloud providers to deliver national platforms to facilitate alignment to NHS data standards

Matt Hancock, has launched the government’s ambition to put mental health on an equal footing to physical health across the world, at the ministerial mental health summit in London.

The CMO is reviewing the impact that too much social media use can have on children’s mental health and will draw up guidance to help parents.

Secretary of State for Health & Social Care, Matt Hancock, has issued an urgent warning on the potential dangers of social media on children’s mental health, stating that the threat of social media on mental health is similar to that of sugar on physical health.

The CMO will draw up guidance to help parents ensure children don’t use social media in a way that harms their mental health.  The guidance will include what age a child should be allowed to sign up to a social media account, and how often they should have access.

The government has announced a package of fresh support to assist child victims of modern slavery and fund innovative ways to improve our response to this abhorrent crime.

During a speech to the McCain Institute in London, where she was presented with an award in recognition of her work fighting modern slavery, PM Theresa May announced a £5m fund to test new approaches to tackling this crime.  More than 40m men, women & children are suffering in modern slavery across the world, with between 10,000 and 13,000 in the UK alone.

The fund will open for applications this week and is the second round of an £11m Modern Slavery Innovation Fund designed to build the evidence base around new approaches to tackle modern slavery around the world.  So far it has supported projects such as GoodWeave and AllianceHR to tackle modern slavery in supply chains linked to UK companies in India & South Africa, and The Salvation Army and Retrak which are supporting victims in Nigeria, the Philippines and Ethiopia.