Lord Darzi's recent 'High quality care for all' report sets a challenging agenda that requires NHS managers to embrace new innovations and technologies in order to deliver the best care for their patients. This is becoming an ever more important issue as the financial environment the NHS operates in becomes ever more restricted. Senior managers will be under constant pressure to identify new ways of delivering cost effective improvements in healthcare delivery.
To enable mangers to take full advantage of new technologies and innovations the SDO Network and the NHS Technology Adoption Centre, held a one day conference 'Embracing healthcare technology and innovation', which aimed to raise awareness of the effective ways of adopting new technologies.
Some of the key issues raised by Professor Trish Greenhalgh at the conference included:
- Introducing a new conceptual model to support understanding of how new medical technologies are adopted in real world NHS environments. This ‘triple helix’ model described the complex interplay between social structures, people and the technologies themselves. Trisha argued that top down linear approaches to the implementation of new technology that ignored the organic nature of how the NHS works would run into significant problems, the national programme for IT and Choose and Book being cases in point.
- Trisha’s take home message from the conference was to use the model to produce simple, practical advice for practitioners and change agents so they could more effectively overcome the challenges they faced.
Key issues from Brian Ibell, Dr Stuart Gold and Sally Chisholm presentations included:
- A key support to creating an innovative culture within the NHS is the ability to effectively link the people with ideas, to people who can make things happen, (who are often senior managers) whilst also ensuring that both managers and clinicians are fully engaged from the outset.
This conference was the first event run by the NHS Confederation which was viewed by a virtual community. The event was screened in Second Health by a total of 74 people, 36 of them staying for longer than 50 minutes. Virtual delegates included people from 6 different countries including the: UK, Italy, Norway, USA South Africa and New Zealand.
View the presentations under 'related documents' and report produced from the conference.