Challenge 2 | The Future’s Bright - The Future’s Where?
Speakers: Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London | John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System | Ala’ Salem, Lecturer in Pharmaceutics, Kingston University | Gil Pennant, Health and Wellbeing Coach, Happy Feelings App | Tom Dolby, Chief Technology Officer, i3 Simulations
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Welcome to challenge session two – ‘The Future’s Bright – The Future’s Where?’. In this session, we’re going to delve into the next wave of breakthroughs, poised to redefine healthcare in South London.
I’ve got a great panel of experts here, and we’re hoping to explore emerging advancements and discuss how these innovations can further push the boundaries of medical practice, enhancing patient outcomes and healthcare delivery across the region.
My name is Anna King, I’m a Director at the Health Innovation Network. We’re one of the organisations set up by NHS England back in 2013, to help spread the adoption of innovation. We do that because it can help with patient outcomes and efficiency, but we do it by working with the industry and the academic sector.
I’m also really excited to be involved with DigitalHealth.London, where we support digital health companies to grow at scale within the NHS and we’re excited to work with those of you who are in parallel dynamic growth.
We’ve got healthcare companies and bioscience companies, which are scaling regionally and nationally, and we encourage them to get in contact because we’re happy to help them too. But we’re best known for our accelerator programme that’s supported over 150 companies so far, to grow and scale.
So that’s me, but I’ve got a fantastic panel of experts. I will give them a moment to introduce themselves and say why they’re particularly interested in this topic today and in innovation. Why don’t you start Gil?
Gil Pennant, Health and Wellbeing Coach, Happy Feelings App
Good afternoon. My name is Gil Pennant and I’m a happiness, health and wellbeing coach, I use happiness as a tool to change.
So here’s the problem we’re facing in some mental health statistics, one in three adults aged 16 to 74 suffer from stress and anxiety. 1 in 5 students are affected by anxiety or depression. 2.8 million people are economically inactive according to government statistics, and this is also due to long-term illness. Our solution, the Happy Feelings App, is based on proven work we’ve done with mental health charities, the DWP, carers organisations and others.
We use happiness to help people get back into society, rebuild confidence, regenerate back into the community, and most importantly, get them back into long-term employment. So I’m excited about how the Happy Feelings App will contribute to this space.
What we’ve been doing is leveraging new technology to scale up the potential. It has the potential to get more people involved, obviously, we’re focussing on South London in this exercise, and it has the potential of reducing NHS spending on mental health treatment. What we do is connect communities around health and wellbeing, so happiness is not just a feeling, it’s a very powerful tool which can be used.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Fantastic. And Tom?
Tom Dolby, Chief Technology Officer, i3 Simulations
Hi everyone, I am Tom Dolby. I am the Chief Technical Officer, of a company called i3 Simulations. Our company uses immersive technology like virtual reality for healthcare, training and education.
Some of you may be familiar with mannequin-based training for physicians to practice responding to emergency events, and that has a lot of fantastic advantages and widely documented benefits. But we are essentially trying to build a digital version of it and the reason why I’m here is because we are introducing new technology to the healthcare space.
This is innovation, which we are doing right now, and the healthcare space is very naturally conservative, I would say when it comes to introducing new technologies, and rightly so, because this sector is dealing with people’s lives, so it’s very important that we prove that this technology works before its widely adopted.
But also doctors are not the most welcoming of people to adopting new technologies, and we are doing our best to have technology be as user-friendly as possible, accessing many innovation schemes and trying to make very low barriers of entry for this type of technology so the doctors have the ability to explore and to understand the benefits, and for us to partner with them on research locations to provide the evidence that the industry needs to adopt innovations.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Great. So we’ve got two people with us on the innovator background, two very different innovations. John, an NHS perspective?
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
Hi everyone. I’m John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer at NHS South London ICP, that’s the group which oversees the spending, and we commissioned around 4.5 million pounds last time.
In my team, we deal with Meds Ops, which is all medication we are getting from the chemist for either long-term conditions, high-cost flow, or complex drug conditions. Anything to do with digital or cyber sits in my portfolio too. So whether it’s the data, the electronic communication record system, or how we think about adoption, like new apps and new technology systems.
The final bit that we do is to help recruitment. And what they are focused on is how we’re going to improve public health, but also populate the NHS to help improve scale. So I get the fact that there is a tension between a whole load of new technologies and people coming with pitches and saying, ‘Please adopt a new technology!’ And it’s lovely and it’s great.
One of the challenges I look at is, how we function, let alone understanding something that doesn’t work properly or very well. But one of my frustrations is, are we adopting the new stuff that’s already here today?
I’ve just been on a call from South West London discussing the National Birth review. So does anyone in this room have diabetes or a family member or close friend with Type 1, or Type 2 diabetes? So 3, 4, 5, that’s quite a few people in the audience. I just learned today that if you end up in one of our hospitals in a crisis related to diabetes, we’re not going to be able to provide you specialist care on a Saturday, Sunday or a bank holiday, because we haven’t organised ourselves properly.
That organisation can be related to money, culture and a whole load of other stuff, but it doesn’t matter what diabetes technology I give you, if you go into crisis and end up in a South West London hospital, we’re going to give you a pinprick in your finger again because we haven’t got our act together.
So there is this tension for me between adopting and pacing the scale of technology, particularly with what we already have, as well as keeping an eye on the future of medications. I am mindful of wanting to adopt new stuff, but I’m also really mindful of what we’re meant to be doing properly in the first place which will also have an impact on quite a few of you in the room.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Fantastic John, thank you. And Ala’, you can give us an academic background?
Ala’ Salem, Lecturer in Pharmaceutics, Kingston University
Yes, so I’m Ala’ Salem, I’m a Lecturer in Pharmaceutics at Kingston University. What I do is as a part of a larger team, we train the chemists that will enter Kingston. Because of my journey that led me to finally join academia, I feel like I have a different perspective on what medications are and what they should or can be.
After I finished my pharmacy degree, I worked at a cancer centre as, traditionally, a pharmacist and then I worked at RPG camp, then I did my masters, and then I worked through the NGO, where we were sending these medications.
When I did my PhD, we were trying to find a better way to cure one of the oldest diseases, which is Tuberculosis, and then after that, I joined a startup where we were trying to treat newer diseases with mRNA technology using lipid nanoparticles and electronic nanoparticles.
After that, I joined academia. So I have a different idea of what research can be, starting from what medication research is, all the way to how a clinician should package the information that we tell the patient for them to get the best results out of their medication, to how many medications are shipped, and then why we should try to raise money for these medications and how best we can serve underprivileged individuals. So looking at the equity and quality of medication as well as extending knowledge.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Fantastic, it’s good to have somebody to look into the medical side of life sciences, as well as the digital and technological side.
This particular session is about the future with blue-sky thinking. Clearly, there are lots of challenges at the moment, there’s managing the budget, and there are large waiting lists for elective care, but we’re interested in the innovations that you see coming down the line that you think are exciting or they have the opportunity to really change the way healthcare works. Shall we start with you, John?
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
So I’m going to start with a tech example, because what I’ve seen in South West London is how we think about working with communities that we live in and work amongst, and it starts with individuals and starts with families and communities.
We’re investing small amounts of money, and thinking about how can we improve the basics of our organisations because we understand that if we can get communities to trust us, we have a better chance of all the technology, all the medication that we’ve got, being multiplied across communities, and accepted by our communities.
One of the problems we’ve got with medications is there’s a lot of medication which is prescribed to people but end up, particularly as we get older, sitting on shelves, for people that don’t understand how to use it or don’t trust us in terms of using it, but they don’t want to disappoint their doctor or nurse by refusing the prescription, and the same applies to immunisation.
We’ve got a whole load of data insights built up by our community and engagement team in South West London, that’s not the majority, but it tells us the stuff we know. So if you’re poor, you’re less likely to be engaged in healthcare, not because you’re thick but you might not have the same educational opportunities. You’re also likely to have a poor outcome because there will be some structural racism built into the NHS and you’ve just got to accept that and do something about it.
Those are just some of the barriers we think about in 2024 plus 2025. So what we decided, alongside our investment in technology, innovation and medication, is to try and create a climate where the people who benefit from this might actually put themselves forward and actually want this stuff, because they’ll understand and we’ve made the effort to go and tell them about it.
In South West London, there’s lots of things we’re doing, but the thing that I think is important, that I’m proud of helping teams do, is thinking about how we engage in communities to explore the opportunities to get health care to all because we talk about the NHS reaching out to everyone, but we know from a simple fact, that’s not the case. So there’s no point in having the innovation unless you create conditions for people to be ready to accept and adopt it.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
I can imagine that there’s communities with people who aren’t going to go to their healthcare provider. But what sort of boundaries are there and what sort of innovation will help solve those issues as well?
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
I can’t speak for every community but recently at our board meeting, we had a DCS group who were running sessions about Russian neuro language online and we started talking to the elderly Russian community about immunisations and vaccinations.
We originally wanted to talk to the first generation about having our COVID and flu (vaccinations), and what we quickly learned was through the elders in the Windrush community. By listening to people and investing small amounts of money and trust into these opportunity groups, we get these insights which we previously didn’t have before. Previously, we might have thought ‘Let’s spend some money on younger Windrush generations’, the mums and the dads who are hesitant about vaccinations, but now the way through that barrier is through the grandparents. So not particularly innovative, it’s just a place of common sense, but I think that’s what we need.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Just important engagement with traditionally involved communities and speaking to people.
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
It’s not speaking to people but going out and listening. The NHS is great at talking to people, but how do we actively listen to people? If we listen to people, we can acknowledge the distrust and some of the challenges that are there, and then sometimes, bigger conversations about how some of the distrust is ill-informed, but you’ll only pick that up with trust by listening to people in the first place.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Okay, so Ala’, in terms of the EPA that you’re working in and the kind of innovations you’re seeing, what are the ones you think that have the biggest impact on healthcare in the next decade?
And what are you doing in terms of the design and development in your role to make sure they learn and are actually in the right place to adopt those innovations?
Ala’ Salem, Lecturer in Pharmaceutics, Kingston University
I think some of the obvious emerging technologies trying to revolutionise healthcare are AI and personalised therapy. I think a lot of what John mentioned about communicating with the general public might be why there are some hurdles known for these technologies not to be more publicly accepted.
You can see from the example of COVID-19, it was very quick for us to have a vaccine and for a lot of people to trust in it but I believe, because of the words that healthcare providers and professionals were using, it was hard for the general public to understand this. The people who were able to communicate this very well didn’t necessarily understand the technology and then came this misinformation. Not because people wanted to misinform each other, but because this is what they understood.
To think about it even then the people we train, so students, even towards their final years of pharmacy, cannot fully comprehend a published paper because of the technological jargon that’s in there, and this is how we train them. We keep telling them terms that they’re not necessarily going to understand, things like dyslipidemia or hypertension and then when they’re dealing with maybe older or much younger people, it’s very hard for them to explain even concepts that they fully comprehend. So communication is one of them.
I believe one of the reasons why IT and AI, in general, are not very widely used, is because it’s effortless to train multidisciplinary students and researchers and then comes the challenge of collaborating with other teams, not because it’s hard to collaborate, but it’s hard to share a joint aim of what they believe teachers should be like. So this makes it even harder for us to reach a future where we have this lovely technology that can enable us that healthcare distribution path and focus on healthcare issues.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Okay, fantastic. And is there anything you think that we should be doing to address those barriers?
Ala’ Salem, Lecturer in Pharmaceutics, Kingston University
One thing I believe is involved in the public. A few weeks ago, when I was trying to take a train, I was approached by individuals who were trying to get some funding for a breast cancer treatment. And while I was willing to donate, I thought about, ‘Okay, so this is also funded by the NHS. And then also want me to almost pay twice for this?’ but if they came up to me and told me, ‘Yes, you might be paying twice for it, but one day in return this innovation will be sourced to the people who have help coming.’ or help them get back to me, or even if they can’t explain to me what this treatment is, instead of saying, ‘Oh, yeah, this is something very cutting edge.’ they might get me to try to be more interested in this treatment. The way we communicate with people is very important.
Another issue, as I mentioned, is that collaboration. One way to get more collaboration is for the funding of our teams to make their aim to create a multidisciplinary team that also engages because we do design these things right and for people just like us, but then they’re not involved in what we do, and they will desire this funding and where it’s going. We need to redirect this, re-shift it, and include a lot of the people in our research to help overcome these challenges.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Good to hear that’s happening in the research end of things. I mean, Gil, your product is very much about improving mental health and happiness in communities. What do you see in terms of this community engagement and the current spread of innovation like yours? What challenges do you see particularly with community engagement?
Gil Pennant, Health and Wellbeing Coach, Happy Feelings App
The main thing is about not getting the technology taking away the element of human contact. So for us, we’re very clear that the technology can add to it, but we’re more focused on one-to-one support sessions like this, face-to-face, making contacts and so forth.
What we’re concerned about is that although we think that the technology would help, it can’t replace one-to-one human contact. Our challenge is balancing between one-to-one support group sessions, interaction, and community building.
But using our app enhances its scalability and a lot more people can access it and so forth. It’s trying to find that balance between personal support and enhancing healthcare with new technologies.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
And in terms of that human element of working with digital innovation, what are you doing to overcome that barrier?
Gil Pennant, Health and Wellbeing Coach, Happy Feelings App
When we do training, initially it would be papers and handouts, and that paper starts to build up. Sometimes it’s quite useful to have an app where you’re linking all your information together, but our focus is more about how we interact with somebody.
What we offer is creating what we call a lifetime happiness plan. When you work with us, we can plan a key takeaway about how you’re going to use your feelings as a motivational instrument to achieve or do whatever you want to do, so how do we balance that?
But there is a place within technology, there is a place that apps and what Tom is talking about can help us. How we overcome it is by not over-emphasizing the tech, but making it clear that it’s a tool that can enhance the work that we’re doing.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
And now Tom, your brand is very different and what you told me, is that it’s very much used by professionals and students, as opposed to members of the public. What are you doing there in terms of aiding doctrine innovation and barriers to doctrine?
Tom Dolby, Chief Technology Officer, i3 Simulations
A lot of our work is partnering with healthcare institutions. We try to make everything we do quite forward-centric. Because you want to make sure that your technology is going to have an impact, so you need to define how you want to make things better or solve a real problem.
Innovation can suffer from people being excited to have it, and people will chase after it. There will be people who grab attention trying to raise investment. But you’ve always got to keep your aspirations very high and keep yourself very grounded at the same time. You’ve got to root your work in computer science and prove that what you’re doing is making a difference.
If you always make sure that your work is problem-centric, everything that you do comes back to ‘Are we solving the problem?’, especially in the healthcare space, it’s so important, and everyone really respects that. Rather than trying to sell a product to people, I actually engage far better with the healthcare space when I am talking about research in these types of events.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Your product is a virtual reality type product, how does that play into the accessibility challenges where your individuals who are part of organisations might not necessarily have the resources to adopt an innovation like that?
Tom Dolby, Chief Technology Officer, i3 Simulations
When I introduced myself, I only mentioned simulation and how it’s widely respected, adopted and beneficial for someone who understands it. Conversely, technology is coming into this, because simulation isn’t accessible in the first place. It is fantastic at what it does, but it can be difficult to organise and it’s expensive, so when you’re budgeting it can be tens of thousands of pounds.
If you want to practice having conversations with a patient, you could hire an actor, but they’re very expensive. You can make your learner’s role-play with your facilitator but they already have a pre-existing relationship with the student, and they can’t have that suspension of reality when they’re speaking to someone who is directly assessing them.
We have this form of training which is great but expensive and I agree with what Gil was saying, I don’t want to remove the human element by making people practice by taking away that human interaction. But we can’t improve with existing offerings for training.
Simulation is widely regarded, as the physicians don’t get to train enough in other types of simulation, so we’re around additional problems, and I don’t think I’m going to make anyone’s jaw hit the floor when I say that practising more often with high-quality training materials makes people better prepared for real-world scenarios.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
John, you get approached by many innovations. You’ve got lots of challenges and clinicians coming to you with their priorities. If there was one particular innovation that you wish that you could wave a magic wand at and it’d be adopted across the NHS, is there something on the wish list?
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
So I’m going to open this up to the audience, anyone that might know in the group. What do you think I might say?
Delegate
Anything around weight loss.
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
Tirzepatide, Ozempic, which is a weight loss drug, if it is safe and the data is right, could transform outcomes for the NHS in 10 years. We’ll have less people potentially with cancer, less people needing to get knee operations, probably less depression, because people will feel less unhappy with their bodies, less hypertension, less Type 2 diabetes, and I could go on and on, and it probably works in the gambling sphere, and now there’s tonnes of emerging evidence.
I first heard about Tirzepatide when I was at a medical school in Uni and we were told that this stuff was coming and in eight years we’re going to have a solution for obesity, which doesn’t involve running marathons, doesn’t involve having to eat less or anything like that which was being developed.
It survived, but there’s a real reticence in the NHS to use it because we think it will blow our budgets, but if anything we can’t afford not to use it. There’s also a reticence to use it because there’s a majority of views that people who are fat or have diabetes because of some innate personal weaknesses. When actually, obesity occurs because we live in a lysogenic environment, and some of us don’t produce as much of the healthy proteins to turn off our depth receptors in the way other people do.
By one choice, yeah we can make the lives easier for doctors and nurses, but I think there are some things out there which is what we get for forcing them out. If you haven’t heard about Tirzepatide or Ozempic yourself, it will be all over the news in the next two weeks who will be saying ‘It’s nice for the body’ and whether we should or shouldn’t use drugs, but then they are going to be releasing a technological appraisal.
There will be big fights about who should get it and where they should get it. You’d have to be living under a rock not to have heard about Tirzepatide and Ozepmic in the next few weeks. So you’ve heard you here first!
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
So that’s where there’s innovation and it’s not just a magic wand. Even if you could give everybody a drug, they need to have a wrap-around of care that supports pre-existing medical conditions, psychological support and digital innovations. I think that’s important.
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
I can come into that, because what we see with Tirzepatide, is people who have two hundred pounds in their pocket can go to Boots or Superdrug and they laugh at you, and they call it a digital wrap-around service for this.
That does bring into question that not everyone’s digitally enabled. God forbid, there are lots of people who are obese and do not have two hundred pounds in their pockets, but the idea that we set up local clinical services with doctors, dietitians and physios so we would be able to see huge numbers of people at scale with minimal digital training, which is why, for the majority of the population, we’ve got to embrace this digital stuff.
People are a bit cleverer than we give them credit for, and just might be able to use it without relying on this, dare I say, parental approach regardless of us teaching them something.
There’s one thing I do want to say about the future, which is back to where we talk about virtual reality and avatars, how many people here have been to see ABBA Voyage? Just three of you. Well if I can give you a top tip, whether you like ABBA or not, go and see it, look at the technology behind those avatars. It is so lifelike it’s scary, but I can envisage in 10 or 15 years, generative AI and decent avatars, who, unlike medical folk like me, won’t need to go to medical school.
In five years, nursing schools and medical schools will be gone because the lifelike avatars will be able to convince human rights, and human beings and be able to wrap this in a veil which we just cannot imagine. You might say it’s a dystopian world. But actually, there’s more of us on the planet and not enough expertise to go around. So why wouldn’t we embrace a digital step-up like that?
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Okay, I like that, we’ve got hybrid solutions, digital and drugs, face-to-face care and digital combinations. And then actually, one area we all can go into is virtual clinicians.
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
We’re not getting rid of them all, it’s just do we resist the future or embrace it?
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Exactly. I think I saw a hand in the audience, is there any other suggestions of things you think we should consider?
Delegate
I just want to say, that I liked the sound of Gil’s personal happiness plan, I think we could all do with one of those. But my question is really for John, during COVID, we saw something very positive when everybody went off to their local pharmacists for support and help, so my question is, is there more of a role in the future for pharmacists to assist in healthcare?
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Gil, what do you think, can you see pharmacists spreading your product?
Gil Pennant, Health and Wellbeing Coach, Happy Feelings App
Yes, I think one thing is clear, when we do work with mental health charities, their clinicians are an important part of our innovation. While patients were going to these clinics, they’d still be going to see their psychologist, so there’s a mix of expertise available to them, from assessment to support.
But now you see supermarkets offering services, and they’re widely more available for customers. So for me, and my app, it’s important and reassuring that they know what they’re doing and they’re able to inform customers about us.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
And Tom, I can see that training students in pharmacies might be placed away from that concept of Virtual Reality in terms of patient education or interaction with these virtual clinicians, is there anything you think will be a particularly good way of engaging in health care?
Tom Dolby, Chief Technology Officer, i3 Simulations
We already have some scenarios which involve pharmacists, dealing with emotional conversations which can be especially difficult. But then in terms of pharmacy in education scenarios, we’re seeing a lot of classes now in conversational Artificial Intelligence that allow us to have realistic and engaging conversations with characters.
I can envisage scenarios such as safeguarding and watching how people are using their prescriptions and how you might approach those types of conversations and being able to practice those types of things.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
(Looking to Ala’) You’re involved in training pharmacists do you have any thoughts?
Ala’ Salem, Lecturer in Pharmaceutics, Kingston University
Yeah, so I’m happy to say that starting this year, all of the pharmacy graduates from Kingston University will be independent prescribers. That means that you can use them to go first, and there is this new initiative, which is privacy first, that encourages people to just indicate political privacy if they have a range of mild amendments.
What I am a bit worried about is the way the NHS is approaching this, because they are trying to use the pharmacist to decrease the load from the physicians and the GP practices. But now, some of the things that pharmacists were able to prescribe medications and treat patients for are on the list of ailments that the NHS is no longer covering. They might have been using the pharmacist to be the person telling the patient how this is no longer covered.
On the other hand, I think I’m very confident that pharmacists can help patients, they are trained on ways to get history from the information about the patient to know what ailments they might have or how they might help them.
Since I was a pharmacist over 10 years ago, we had online tools that helped us to calculate doses they just applied to high doses or drug interactions. So there are tools that also help us in making us more confident in helping patients. We can also call the GP if the patient is particularly unwell. So pharmacists do play an important role in getting patients treated and dealing with complicated information.
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
I’d like to comment on this as I am a GP by background. Twenty years ago if you asked me that question, it’s because you’re into our territory, you’re into our business, and it’s going to cost us money.
That was 10 years ago, and we’re a bit more mature and I think GPs are too because they understand. There’s more of a workout getting the rest of it, so why wouldn’t we use highly skilled and trained clients? You might know a bit more about tablets and their functions than we do as they spend four or five years studying them.
So the answer to your question is yes, absolutely, there’s two different sets of community pharmacies in South West London and only 117 GP practices. There will be a cultural change because those of you who are used to going into community pharmacies, now have to clamber over the Clarins counter before you can get to the intelligent person behind the pharmacy. But we’re not all about building promotions.
Last year as an ICP, we invested health inequalities money into a Winter Fit program. We would talk to elderly and vulnerable people about simple things like what to do about eating and we were getting them to do some social describing, as opposed to pillar describing. We’re helping pharmacies personally scale over to the pharmacies in South West London. We are one of the first ICPs to prescribe exercise and drinking more water. By bringing to fruition, a pharmacy-delivered model amongst our general practice is the only way we’re going to be able to do that.
Delegate
But if I ring my GP, I’m put 14th in the queue and if I can’t get to the pharmacy…
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
You don’t have to ring your GP, download the NHS app and do it remotely. In terms of the NHS app, we’ve got the highest adoption rate in South West London compared to the UK, I’ve recently gone for an appointment and it’s all done remotely through the NHS app.
What I say to anyone in this audience is the NHS app is safe. It’s brilliant, please use it. Please allow it to message you and all that stuff which you need to do in general, will now be done remotely and automatically through your NHS app.
If you can’t use the app fair to your vulnerability, that means surgeries will have more time there to chase you down to the old-fashioned ways. But for those of us who are slightly tech-enabled please just embrace the NHS App. The advertisement is over.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
One of the things I heard recently, which I thought was compelling, is that they put the 111 telephone service into the NHS app now. They’ve done studies to see whether the outcome of people being sent to the right place was successful if they answered the questions themselves in the NHS app and they found by going through it all in the app, you get a better outcome for yourself and it’s cheaper on the NHS. So I thought I’d just continue the sales pitch there.
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
We need to talk about digital exclusion because it is real and it shouldn’t be a barrier in terms of supporting 80 to 90% of the population. The only reason I’m in favour of digital is that it allows human beings to be where we need them and gives them more time and space to support vulnerable people in our community. Whether they’ve got learning disabilities or problems with using technology for communication, the only way we’ll be able to support these most vulnerable communities is to free up times of care again, which is why embracing digital should be the way.
Say we want to do something about CO2 emissions, you’d get on a bus or get on the train and don’t drive your car. It’s the same in that regard, if you want to create capacity, use the digital services where they are available. Stop feeling as though you are entitled to face-to-face, particularly for young people.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Okay, so going back to innovation and how we’ve adopted it. I’ve heard things like working with academics, the NHS, innovators and community sectors but is there anything else? Let’s start with Ala’, is there anything that you think we should do in South London and the UK to improve collaboration and make sure we actually support businesses’ innovations?
Ala’ Salem, Lecturer in Pharmaceutics, Kingston University
First of all collaboration amongst the industry and academia or researchers as well as the community. It is the best way for us to make sure that there is inclusivity, and that we’re not missing any members of the community who are less represented. This enables us to be more innovative with our research and products as well.
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
In other words, the NHS commercial sector, BCSC, needs to start getting over itself. We didn’t embrace this year or raise the opportunity to be part of something I think that, we in healthcare, need to make because we’ve been too busy for too long and making too many assumptions that we know best. We now no longer think that though.
Tom Dolby, Chief Technology Officer, i3 Simulations
In healthcare and academia as well, so many people are under constant pressure. There’s financial pressure, we’ve got to cut costs, and we’ve got to do less.
The main thing comes down to time, for so many people they may resonate with the feeling of trying to hold things together, or ‘I need to just keep things moving’. This feeling can introduce a sort of moral paralysis or stagnation for innovation because everyone’s too busy just trying to get to the end.
Many people who we’ve worked with, when they stop and they talk to us about innovation, when it comes to the time commitment that they need to do to get involved in this sort of thing, they don’t have the support from their administration. Their schedules are just so overcrowded, developing technology and working with business owners.
There’s also coproduction, too many students graduate and in their thesis and their research got a first, but universities need to engage those students. They need to get into projects that have some real-world impact.
What we can do as academic institutions is provide them with services. They provide the subject experts and they can do their evaluations, and they do the publications between and the student, in the end, makes a real impact with their research. We can then collaborate with that product and provide a new revenue stream for the university, something which we drastically need because they’re strangled by the feet. They need to be thinking about how we work together and make this world a better place.
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
Can I add something? In the NHS we’re a very public-spirited organisation. But as a result of that and working with the commercial sector on joint ventures and winning the technology and innovation, we’re always giving our stuff and our intellectual property. Take MRI scans, that’s a generator. We’re giving stuff away because we have this activity to work with the commercial sector.
Frankly, we need to get over ourselves in the NHS in terms of some thinking and work with commercial sectors. But also be clear with commercials, we want you to design products to fix the problems we’re facing, whether it be obesity or age relative, that stuff as opposed to technology you think is clever but isn’t going to fix the needs we’ve got in terms of the service.
Gil Pennant, Health and Wellbeing Coach, Happy Feelings App
The biggest thing is the tax incentives with collaboration in various ways. You can look at the private sector, like the NHS, collaborating to coordinate solutions. We can look at joint training to improve specific issues.
We can look at data sharing while being careful with patient privacy. But the key thing is collaborations and placements, so perhaps some private sector companies can collaborate so innovators can go back to the main aim of the product while still working with the private sector and pharmacies throughout South London and beyond.
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
Gil? Thank you. Well, I think we’re almost out of time, probably about five minutes to go, so if anyone has any questions, we’re happy to take one.
Delegate
Yes, I didn’t catch what the name of that medication was.
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
Ah yes, Tirzepatide. I can give you a free consultation at the end if you need it. (Audience laughs)
Delegate
I work for an organisation that does a lot of work with the NHS and their charities. We look at getting our projects largely involved in the South West London ICA’s to get the pilot of that project out to patients better.
What I found specifically when you’re talking to people, the main selling point is what it does, what it can bring for stakeholders, and so it’s very much about the communication to patients and how you manage the message.
But when we’re selling something to the GP practices for South West London and other factors, it’s very much about what GP practices want for their patients, so I always want to make sure we’re using the right type of messaging, because with myself if I’m looking at a transformative piece, it can be quite sell, sell and not customer orientated. So I just want to make sure that is the right approach for an innovator.
John Byrne, Chief Medical Officer, NHS South West London Integrated Care System
It’s getting better. We do use a really good service, where the points you made about innovation come in. It’s all about the sales and those are what we are reading and seeing. But that’s a really good example, which a lot of hard work and backbreak has gone in from my teams over the years. Whether or not the NHS has capitalised on the personal investment professionals and teams is a good point.
Delegate
On that note, my kids asked me to go pick him up from school. (Audience laughs)
Anna King, Commercial Director, Health Innovation Network South London
With that in mind, thank you all very much, thank you to my panellists and our fantastic audience. I believe we’re heading into the main room for the next part of the Summit.
