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- 30 January 2025
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Your morning summary of digital health news, information and events to know about if you want to be “in the know”.
News
Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is working alongside the Hospital Germans Trias i Pujol in Barcelona to develop new digital training modules. Titled ‘Healthcare Innovation and Adoption: Principles, Strategies, and Future Trends’, the resources are designed to help drive digitisation in healthcare organisations, covering topics such as digital health tools and AI, barriers to adoption and ways to engage stakeholders.
East Cheshire NHS Trust has announced that its virtual ward programme has supported 1,335 patients. Launched in January 2023, the trust’s ‘Hospital at Home’ model enables patients to receive specialised care and services outside of the hospital, supported by a team of advanced clinical practitioners, community nurses, therapists and rapid response care providers. On average, the virtual ward supports 40 to 50 patients daily.
Suffolk Libraries has launched a new online search tool designed to help members of the public find local events, activities and services that can boost their wellbeing. Discover More leverages data from Suffolk Libraries and Suffolk County Council’s online community directory and then tailored recommendations according to each users’ interests and wellbeing goals. The platform was developed in partnership with mental health charity Suffolk Mind and digital agency Orbital Global.
An app has gone live at Royal Bolton Hospital to keep parents updated on the care of their babies. vCreate NICU Diaries allows nursing teams to share photos and video updates from the hospital’s neonatal unit, ensuring patients feel reassured when they are unable to be on the unit. Parents can also ask questions to, and receive messages from, care teams, with the app supporting multiple languages.
Cloud-based telephony provider Babblevoice has been added to the Crown Commercial Service’s G-Cloud 14 framework, meaning GP surgeries, NHS commissioners and Primary Care Networks can now access its services via the UK Government’s Digital Marketplace. Babblevoice offers automated call-back, detailed telephony analytics and customisable reporting tools, helping NHS services to reduce call waiting times, optimise staffing and improve patient satisfaction.
Did you know?
Almost £14 bn is needed to plug a rocketing build-up of NHS repairs, according to a National Audit Office (NAO) report, with public sector maintenance backlogs including hospitals estimated to have reached £49 bn.
The report, published on 22 January 2025, found that, on average, some 5,400 clinical service incidents occurred in the NHS every year between 2019-20 and 2023-24 as a result of property and infrastructure failures.
Commenting on the findings, Saffron Cordery, interim chief executive at NHS Providers, said: “The safety of patients and staff is at risk. This can’t go on.
“The list of essential repairs across the NHS waiting to be done keeps getting longer and the costs are rocketing. Vital bits of the NHS are literally falling apart after years of underinvestment nationally.”
What we’re reading
Think tank, The Health Foundation assesses the feasibility Labour’s 18-week elective care target in its analysis, ‘Government’s plan for 18-week NHS waiting times: is it realistic?‘
The report, published on 17 January 2025, estimates that hitting the target will require the number of people being removed from waiting lists to increase from 20.8 million a year in July 2024, to 23.5 million a year in July 2029. This will require around 500,000 extra treatments in the first year, rising to 2.6 million extra treatments in the final year — an annual increase of 2.4%.
While The Health Foundation suggests this is achievable, the percentage of patients currently waiting 18 weeks or less will need to increase from 59% in October 2024 to 92% by July 2029, it says. It points out that this standard has not been met since 2015/16, leaving “a huge gap between the performance standard and the service patients are experiencing.”
It also notes that, while the last Labour government succeeded in driving waiting times down from 12 weeks to five, it did so “in more promising economic circumstances, over a longer period of time and with more significant increases in investment than are likely to be available this time.”
The report concludes: “While [reforms] will help, the impact they will have is uncertain.
“Meeting the government’s pledge while addressing pressing needs in other areas of care will be a huge challenge.”
Upcoming events
12 February, webinar – Ensuring data quality in AI: Practical and ethical challenges