Tuesday, May 05, 2009

NHS My Brilliant Idea


NHS South East Coast have set up a regional innovation fund of £2 million, to allow frontline staff develop ideas.

As you might expect an interim Director of Innovation has been appointed, which I suppose is necessary as a further £5 million will be bunged into fund every year, for the next four.

One example given in the press release from the South East Coast NHS, is this, a Telemedicine Team, at the Queen Victoria Hospital in West Sussex, who have set up a system to share information and expertise, using “secure” internet channels, which is great news meaning that patients wont have to be transferred to other hospitals to enable another medic to take a gander.

The only thing that bothers me is reference to “telemedicine system” which sounds like some computer consultant has got involved and has taken freely available technology given it a bit of spin, used words like secure and system , to repackage as an expensive solution.

Just going off on a tangent, I reckon with a broadband connection, email, the telephone and or maybe Skype(free) for video conferencing you could set up your own telemedicine for near zero cost, all you need then, is to rustle up some medics.

Here’s my brilliant idea, get managers who are a) competent b) have a proper job c) can prioritise and distinguish what’s important and what’s not d) sack whoever thought up this scheme. Hopefully this would result in a saving of £20 million plus.

3 comments:

  1. The NHS is a tightly run machine, and developments like this are proof of management commitment to continually improve services.

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  2. The NHS seems to have plenty of cash in East kent too!
    They have an job add in Kentonline:
    ---------------------------
    NHS
    Eastern and Coastal Kent

    Eastern and Coastal Kent |ECK] is developing a world class Contracting and Procurement Team to ensure the effective commissioning of high quality services for the population of ECK through robust contracting and procurement.

    We are currently looking to recruit to the following posts:


    Head of Placements
    Band 8a: £37,996 - £65,596p.a.
    ----------------------------------

    So how much is the whole team going to cost and clearly they are unsure of the value of the job with such a large pay range.

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  3. and how does all of this sit alongside the existing 6 NHS innovation-related agencies described at http://www.clickrich.co.uk/2009/06/no-shortage-of-help-in-nhs-innovation.html?

    ReplyDelete