The Central Government current response to manage the health crisis has been impressive. It has empowered not just the private sector vendors but individual departments to design and deliver solutions within days. Rapid engagement with the market, rapid procurement and rapid scale up of national solutions.
Is the NHS digital-ready?
The rapid uptake on digital solutions rolled out nationally demonstrates the latent willingness within our NHS to adopt digital ways of working. Our NHS workforce is digitally ready. They can respond rapidly to situations that create the imperative to change. The next big imperative will be recovery. Can central government manage recovery? Can NHSx create the right digital environment, like they have done in crisis response, to continue empowering our digitally ready workforce to leapfrog the previous digital transformation ambition through recovery?
Never waste a good crisis
The digital solutions that have really taken off within the current crisis are remote working and virtual patient interactions. These are solutions that help solve day-to-day challenges faced by the frontline and positively impact the daily lives of individual staff. The reboot gives NHSx another great opportunity to deliver positive digital transformation to frontline services.
"Make it the best summer ever for our NHS staff!"
We must prioritise digital solutions that address the immediate needs of frontline staff, supporting the workforce that is undergoing recovery itself. These priorities include previously unglamorous projects such as Digital Outpatients management and realtime Digital Demand and Capacity co-ordination, which can have an immediate and direct impact on the frontline.
The success of the current crisis response is heavily reliant on the commitment and sacrifices made by the workforce. To ensure we continue to deserve such dedication from our frontline, we must create digital solutions for recovery that make their daily lives easier, more effective and more rewarding.