Campaign Week: How tech can help avoid the winter crisis

10 Jan 2018 04:18 PM

In February, techUK is running a campaign week for you to share your ideas on how tech can help avoid a winter crisis in health and social care. 

techUK will be holding a Campaign Week series on the theme of ‘How technology can help avoid a winter crisis in health and social care’ from 26 February to 2 March 2018 and we would be delighted to have you contribute to it.

Background

There are daily stories in the media about winter pressures in the NHS. This makes it easy to forget that the NHS ranks as one of the best healthcare systems in the world. But there are real challenges, particularly during the winter period. The challenges can be summarised as high demand, constrained spending, staffing issues, and problems with the flow of patients through the system. There is a lot of good work currently being done across the Health and Social Care ecosystem to address these problems and the tech industry is conscious that technology is no panacea. We do, however, believe that the sector can make a valuable contribution to help solving these issues.

In October 2017, techUK launched an investigation into how technology can help avoid a winter crisis in health and social care. The investigation provides an opportunity for the technology community to meaningfully contribute and support those in the NHS working to solve some of the supply and demand challenges.

How to get involved

Why not join this debate and discussion on how technology can help solve some of these challenges? Each day during the week there will be a different topic with blog posts, tweets and case studies centred on the themes below. This could be a thought leadership blog post (max 600 words), a case study or a video that demonstrates your view on this issue. We’d like to invite you to contribute on one of the topics outlined below. The topics follow the themes of the paper we launched last year and the questions that were raised in the paper. If you wish to contribute to a different topic then we are happy to explore further with you.

Topics

• ‘Relentless’ demand:
  • How can technology enable and equip health and social care professionals to deliver services remotely?
  • Accessing the system: Can technology reduce the number of people unnecessarily attending A&E?
  • Keeping people out of hospital: How can technology help to support people to remain in their homes and keep people from being admitted to hospitals or care homes?
  • Prevention is better: How can the proliferation of connected devices keep us healthy?
• Constrained supply:
  • The bed-blocking challenge: How can technology assist with the management of patient flow through the hospital?
  • The workforce challenge: How can technology ease problems of recruitment and workforce planning?
  • Breaking down silos: How can improved data collection and analytics be used as an enabler in the move towards a focus on population health?

If you would like to contribute, please can you email your interest to Kate Francis (kate.francis@techUK.org) by Friday 19 January. The deadline for submission of blogs is 12 February 2018.

When you submit the blog please can you also include the name, job title of the author as well as a blog title (max 60 characters) and any social media handles you would like us to use.

Please do get in touch if you have any questions or queries.