The bigger the organisation, the harder innovation becomes, simply because you risk even worse fragmentation of methods than you already have. You can become buried in a plethora of experiments and beta versions.
But there can be (and should be) conflict between people who conduct health care and those pushing new ways of doing it. Bright ideas often sound brighter than they actually are. They might require training, retraining, a change of data types, and yet more training a year in for v2.0. Fine when you are sitting around a desk with a couple of willing testers. But when you are talking about 50,000 nursing staff who need to retrain yet again, your bright idea has just become a brick wall.
There is also a terrible habit of making life harder in the attempt to make it easier. I think here of my aunt's care. She has carers visit 5 times a day.
The most recent agency has been talked into using an online management system by some company. I now get an email to say the carer is on the way, an email to say they have left, and an email asking for feedback - that links to an online form of ratings plus a comment field.
Fifteen emails into my inbox on top of everything else I deal with. And since I don't live at my aunt's, and she has dementia, there is no way I can fill out the feedback form. So I don't.
But if I and everyone else did fill out the form, (including the carer who is meant to list everything they just did), the little care company then gets deluged by data.
And it creates data holes. What happens if someone forgets to fill out a feedback form? Does that mean they were too busy? That the care was so bad they were speechless? It was fine so they didn't bother? You always know why someone feedbacks data, but you never know why they don't unless you spend even more time to chase them up and ask them, which might not be welcomed.
This is innovation, but it is bad innovation. And as much as the NHS and other orgs might be slow in taking on new ideas, there is a long-standing set of good reasons why they are sometimes cautious. They have been sold far too many sow's ears or ended up with brand new systems that are dated within a year and they have to buy another one.
The NHS MUST focus on care first, and look at innovation second. And the reason is the patient. If nothing else has come clear over the last 1/4 century of IT innovation in the NHS, by far the best care still comes from wonderfully analogue interactions between clinical/caring staff and the patient.
And with that often weakened by staff shortages, that must come first. There isn't an app that can truly replace a therapist sitting down with someone and showing them how to cope with something.
The bigger the organisation, the harder innovation becomes, simply because you risk even worse fragmentation of methods than you already have. You can become buried in a plethora of experiments and beta versions.
But there can be (and should be) conflict between people who conduct health care and those pushing new ways of doing it. Bright ideas often sound brighter than they actually are. They might require training, retraining, a change of data types, and yet more training a year in for v2.0. Fine when you are sitting around a desk with a couple of willing testers. But when you are talking about 50,000 nursing staff who need to retrain yet again, your bright idea has just become a brick wall.
There is also a terrible habit of making life harder in the attempt to make it easier. I think here of my aunt's care. She has carers visit 5 times a day.
The most recent agency has been talked into using an online management system by some company. I now get an email to say the carer is on the way, an email to say they have left, and an email asking for feedback - that links to an online form of ratings plus a comment field.
Fifteen emails into my inbox on top of everything else I deal with. And since I don't live at my aunt's, and she has dementia, there is no way I can fill out the feedback form. So I don't.
But if I and everyone else did fill out the form, (including the carer who is meant to list everything they just did), the little care company then gets deluged by data.
And it creates data holes. What happens if someone forgets to fill out a feedback form? Does that mean they were too busy? That the care was so bad they were speechless? It was fine so they didn't bother? You always know why someone feedbacks data, but you never know why they don't unless you spend even more time to chase them up and ask them, which might not be welcomed.
This is innovation, but it is bad innovation. And as much as the NHS and other orgs might be slow in taking on new ideas, there is a long-standing set of good reasons why they are sometimes cautious. They have been sold far too many sow's ears or ended up with brand new systems that are dated within a year and they have to buy another one.
The NHS MUST focus on care first, and look at innovation second. And the reason is the patient. If nothing else has come clear over the last 1/4 century of IT innovation in the NHS, by far the best care still comes from wonderfully analogue interactions between clinical/caring staff and the patient.
And with that often weakened by staff shortages, that must come first. There isn't an app that can truly replace a therapist sitting down with someone and showing them how to cope with something.
Here's a few elements of innovation and their impact on health, AHSNs were setup for this purpose:
https://www.easternahsn.org/healthcare-provider/impact-stories/