Due to the extreme challenges currently facing the healthcare sector, the team behind HETT (Healthcare Excellence Through Technology) is exploring new and innovative ways to create carefully curated content, whilst providing a suitable platform to share best practice and guidance ‘on the go’ to busy healthcare professionals.
The sector we proudly serve is under enormous strain and we are committed to hosting virtual events that can deliver value at such an important time. The first of these came in the form of our first webinar, “Becoming Frontline Ready”, which took place earlier this month and was attended by more than 300 people.
We brought together an expert panel including: Dr Neil Ralph, Head of Technology Enhanced Learning, Directorate of Innovation and Transformation, Health Education England (who is a part of the team overseeing training at the Nightingale hospitals); Dr Alisdair Smithies, Head of Educational Innovation, Imperial College London; Dr Sandeep Bansal, Chief Executive Officer, Medic Creations (a former and returning clinician); Sarah Goodhew, Advanced Clinical Practice Programme Manager, Health Education England (a former and returning ICU Nurse); and Dr David Cox, Neonatologist, Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust (a recent graduate), to discuss how COVID-19 is becoming a catalyst for healthcare modernisation.
Setting the scene, Dr Cox stated we’re dealing with an extreme scenario that is having a huge impact upon staffing. “Due to this crisis we have seen people redeployed from our organisation to other institutions or other places and asked to take on different roles. Therefore, we need to be supporting all of these people and that includes those coming back from retirement or those being fast-tracked into the system from lower levels, as well as the people moving in different directions who are already working within the system,” he added.
Dr Ralph explained there had been an “astonishingly rapid coming together of all key organisations across the system that enable us to have a workforce and to support that workforce”. He said systems and processes had been “rapidly created” to ensure people could come back into practice by issuing temporary registrations, by helping them to understand their roles and responsibilities, as well as enabling people to come out of training early. Running in parallel, support mechanisms have been put in place, including the recent launch of NHS England’s Support Service, which includes an app and a helpline.
Dr Cox reiterated there is a need for Just-In-Time Learning and how it will be “a real challenge” to strategise that at both a local and national level. He explained it is fundamental to understand people’s training requirements and explore how digital can support the delivery of that training – and this has only grown in importance due to social distancing rules, where it is now unfeasible to ask 30 people to attend a live demonstration in the same room. Dr Cox concluded by saying that for successful healthcare modernisation, the health service will need to lean on new technologies – such as videos, webinars, online learning, simulations, or gamification – where it hasn’t needed to before.
Providing an example, Dr Ralph said that clinicians may be faced with a range of ventilators they are typically unfamiliar with, which can cause anxiety, and therefore his department has been working with the various manufacturers to create training videos.
Chairing the session, Dr Smithies explained that the NHS has been making provisions to maintain social distancing in many environments. ‘Bring Your Own Device’ will be a crucial enabler for training to take place in these pressured times in ways that don’t involve close contact of healthcare staff. Dr Cox agreed, stating “whenever a technology tool or system is used, we need to request that remote learning is curated because this will be the safest way”.
Ms Goodhew provided valuable insight into how she has been contributing towards new online resources, via the eLearning for Health platform, which are designed to equip different individuals with the knowledge and skills required to step up to the new challenges the health service is currently facing. This includes those people wishing to refresh their skills, plus the significant number of staff who are moving into unfamiliar and new clinical spaces.
“The challenge is to enable the learning resources to be helpful, credible and timely, in a portable way so they can used here and now – and some of that could be at a patient’s bedside… We have also been mindful that the focus should be on bite-sized learning as we are conscious of the cognitive overload that people are going through at this time,” she said.
With regards to the impact of digitisation, Dr Bansal said the recent procurement of telemedicine platforms and the roll-out of Microsoft Teams for online consultations was a great initiative. He also spoke about key challenges around communication in the current environment, stating there’s approximately one billion internal phone calls across the NHS (within hospitals only) each year – and that this will dramatically rise due to COVID-19. He added that pagers have been widely used for around 70 years, and he has been working on a project to replace these with instant communication technology that operates from people’s own smart devices – which is advantageous from a hygiene perspective as doctors and nurses do not have to use communal landlines. Dr Bansal discussed how this technology can create significant efficiency gains, saving nurses 21 minutes per shift, and junior doctors 48 minutes per shift.
For a wider roll-out, “you need a lot of infrastructure in place – the right Wi-Fi, 3g and 4g capabilities, plus devices – and I know there’s a lot of work taking place with telecoms providers to make that happen across the NHS rapidly,” he added.
Wrapping up the session, Dr Smithies said this crisis has “proven to be a huge catalyst” for healthcare modernisation projects that would have previously taken years rather than weeks or months. I cannot agree more; and whilst I hope these investments will have an immediate and overwhelmingly positive impact, I hope they will also be used as an example of how healthcare services can embark on the next chapter of modernisation once the crisis is over.
HETT 2020, the UK’s leading digital health and healthtech event, is organised by GovNet, and takes place 29-30th September at ExCeL London. For more information, visit https://hettshow.co.uk.
By Corby Ganesh, Portfolio Director, HETT