As Chief Scientific Officer at Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, Professor David Brettle, is responsible for delivering transformational healthcare technologies to ensure staff can work effectively in data-driven, digital hospitals (1)
How do you deliver two new digital hospitals with a smaller footprint than the estate they replace and with an expected growth in patient numbers? For good measure, they also need to be sustainable and promote economic growth!
The Innovation Pop Up is the first step to help answer this challenge.
Historically, Leeds Teaching Hospitals has a fantastic track record in innovation with a series of national and international breakthroughs, including the clinical thermometer, the first hospital use of AI, the world’s first double hand transplant and the birth of modern emergency medicine, to name a few.
In fact, the Leeds General Infirmary was the world’s first civic hospital. We know that the right innovation and technology can save lives and make life better for staff.
Still, it can be difficult to adopt in large hospitals due to work pressures, established work practices and the cost of implementation.
Staff engagement for new healthcare technologies
“People make a place”, and it is never truer than in a hospital, so our key priority was staff engagement and helping them understand and embrace the challenges and opportunities of introducing new technologies.
Staff need to have the chance to try new technologies they wouldn’t ordinarily come across and evaluate them in a safe space to identify what will work and what won’t.
Working with our partners and industry, we can maximise the opportunities and benefits for new technology development in Leeds whilst building our credibility as a health-technology enabler and stimulating the growth of the health-technology sector in the Leeds region.
Innovation Pop Up at Leeds General Infirmary
The Innovation Pop Up based in Leeds General Infirmary was, therefore, conceived as an agile initiative to stimulate interest in innovation.
It provides a physical space in the hospital where we can readily engage with colleagues, partners, and industry in a non-clinical setting.
It enables us to operate on the ‘NHS side of innovation ‘with the same real-world challenges and limitations as the wider hospital but in a clinically safe space.
Launched almost two years ago, the Pop Up is home to a growing collective of companies that benefit from access to clinical teams, tailored business support and open-plan workspace.
In the last year, we have worked with 150 companies, clinicians, and entrepreneurs from the UK and worldwide, including Israel, Norway, Spain, Canada, Japan, Switzerland, the U.S., and Taiwan, resulting in 30 collaborations and ten funding opportunities.
We are helping streamline regulatory processes to make it easier for companies to conduct evaluations and commercialise their innovations in the UK – because we recognise that many good ideas never make it past the pilot stage, and those lost innovations are lost opportunities for potentially better patient care.
New transformational technologies for the future of healthcare
Through the Innovation Pop Up, we can introduce our workforce to new transformational technologies now, ahead of the opening of our new data-driven digital hospitals, which we believe will be vital for the future of healthcare.
These core transformational healthcare technologies are:
Real-Time Location Systems, an established and mature technology outside of health, allow staff to track and locate equipment quickly.
This may not sound transformational until you consider that it has been reported that a third of nurses spend at least an hour or more per shift looking for equipment.
Removing this problem is equivalent to creating an additional 2.7% extra nursing capacity in the NHS without additional recruitment. (2)
Remote monitoring and virtual wards will harness data’s power to enable seamless patient management across the broader healthcare system.
At the same time, they remain in the best place for them, whether that be on a ward or at home.
Providing a better patient experience
Breaking the limitations of traditional hospital-centric transactional health will free up valuable hospital beds by reducing the length of stay and providing a better patient experience and outcomes whilst easing the work pressures on staff.
Smart devices will empower the population to take greater control over their own health and encourage more preventative care by anticipating health problems before they happen.
In addition, they can provide a single portal to health providers, for example, remote consultations, diagnostic results and even automatic check-in and navigation when visiting the hospital.
On top of these transformations are the limitless clinical innovations, such as using Virtual Reality to help distract young patients when having injections or blood samples taken or ultrasonic surgery to treat cancer patients without invasive operations.
Innovation Pop Up won research and innovation category at NHS Awards
We believe the Innovation Pop Up approach is working, and last year, the Pop Up won the research and innovation category in the NHS England Chief Scientific Officer’s Excellence in Healthcare Science Awards.
The Chief Scientific Officer for NHS England, Professor Dame Susan Hill, praised the Pop Up initiative for fostering “impressive new technologies” and “the cross fertilisation of ideas that happen by bringing entrepreneurs and clinicians together”. (3)
As it stands, the physical Innovation Pop Up is only a temporary solution. One day, it will ‘pop-down’ again. Its job will be done when we open the doors to our new data-driven, digital hospitals and our fully trained staff are using the latest technologies to deliver outstanding healthcare to the people of Leeds, Yorkshire and beyond, all the while flourishing in a culture of innovation at the heart of the Leeds City Innovation Arc. (4)
References
- https://engage.dhsc.gov.uk/nhs-recovery/40-new-hospitals/
- https://www.nursingtimes.net/archive/nurses-waste-an-hour-a-shift-finding-equipment-10-02-2009/
- https://www.leedsth.nhs.uk/about-us/news-and-media/2022/03/02/pioneering-innovation-pop-up-wins-excellence-in-healthcare-science-research-and-innovation-award-and
- https://www.inclusivegrowthleeds.com/leeds-innovation-arc
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