Host Jordan Sollof chats to CAREFUL CEO Dr DJ Hamblin-Brown and Simon Weldon, Chief Executive Officer at South East Coast Ambulance Service NHS FT, about the challenges of clinical coordination in the UK.
This podcast uncovers their personal experience, an up-close assessment of the challenges involved and an optimism for the future.
If you’d prefer the text, here’s the transcript:
Jordan Sollof
Hello and welcome to the latest episode of Digital Health Unplugged. I’m your host Jordan Sollof, News Reporter at Digital Health. We have a great edition of the podcast coming up for you, focused on the challenges of clinical coordination in the NHS and why the UK health system.
We have two fantastic guests to delve into that I’m going to let them introduce themselves. Could you tell us who you are, what you do and a bit about your career journey today?
I’ll come to you first DJ.
Dr DJ Hamblin-Brown
Thank you, Jordan. It’s great to be here. I’m DJ Hamblin-Brown.
I’m an emergency doctor primarily. I have had some experience in managing hospitals, both here in the UK and also elsewhere in Asia. My current role is as CEO of CAREFUL – which is Careful Online – which is a clinical coordination platform.
Jordon Sollof
Thanks DJ, great to have you. And Simon?
Simon Weldon
Hi, good to be here, Jordan. I’m Simon Weldon. I’m the Chief Exec of South East Coast Ambulance Trust.
Long career in the NHS, working in a variety of commissioning and provider jobs nationally, regionally and locally. I’m really looking forward to this discussion.
Jordon Sollof
Great, thanks. Great to have you on the podcast as well.
Let’s get straight into it then.
Obviously, we’re focusing on clinical coordination. For our listeners who may be a little bit unsure about that, what do we mean exactly by clinical coordination and what does it involve?
Dr DJ Hamblin-Brown
Well, if you’re happy Simon, let me start off with my take on this, if that’s OK. So I think the thing about clinical coordination – it’s what patients need at pretty much any stage in their journey. And I think we’re trying to help patients and clinicians answer the question about what’s happening next in their care.
So the focus is, in my view, on ensuring that we have the right information to flow across boundaries so that people can answer the question what’s happening next and who is responsible in a patient’s care. And we’ll talk a little bit about why that’s difficult. But I think that’s my very sort of brief suggestion about it.
And we’ll think about why that’s difficult, I guess, in a few minutes.
Simon Weldon
If I can answer that question by maybe telling a story, which was really resonant for me about some of the issues that we face. So on my very first ride out on an ambulance, we were called to see an elderly woman who had quite significant mental health problems, and she was threatening to burn her flat down. And we arrived at this place having had a 999 call to go and see her.
And immediately we got in there, we were trying to find out who knew about her. And it quickly became evident that she was in contact because she told us herself that she was in contact with mental health services, but we couldn’t see it. So we looked up on our CAD, but we had no record of her contacting mental health services.
We had no information about her. So we did a very analogue thing and rang the mental health services. And they said, yeah, we think we know who you’re talking about. Let us put you through to the right department.
The phone in that building rang and rang and rang and nobody picked it up. So we left it a few minutes, then rang back to what was called the single point of access, supposedly the single place that you can go to get an answer to all the issues that you need as a professional.
They said, yes, we’re really sorry about that. The number that we put you through to the room there isn’t occupied anymore. So the phone was ringing, but nobody was there. Let us put you through to the right number.
So we had another phone, ring, ring, ring, and the phone continued to go and nobody picked up. So we put the phone down, rang back the single point of access now for the third time.
And they said, terribly sorry, they’re very busy. Let’s go around. We’ll go. But fortunately, we’re in the same building. We’ll go around and get them to call you back. And that’s what then happened.
All of that took 45 minutes to an hour while we were sitting there trying to work out how best to help and serve this woman who was in quite a lot of distress. They called us back. Yes, we know her, they said. And funnily enough, sorry, you’ve been called out. We were with her about two hours ago.
And OK, so what do we do – so because obviously we’re not sure whether what’s going on for her is normal or not normal. Do we need to admit her? Do we need to take her to hospital? No.
This is a pretty typical presentation. What does she want? And she wanted some a prescription from primary care.
So we then spent the next hour ringing the doctor. And a further series of phone calls to try and speak to somebody to get her a prescription that could then be delivered to the local pharmacy so we could go and pick it up.
By the time we’d left her, we’d spent two and a half hours. And most of what we were doing there was trying to manually navigate our way through a system to coordinate care for a patient. And for me, that story shows up all of the issues. It’s true story, shows up all of the issues that the ambulance sector experience in terms of trying to know what’s going on for patients.
And we’re the kind of system integrator in lots of ways because people come to us in all sorts of different conditions, all sorts of different states. And that story for me indicates the kind of current state, but also, I suppose, the potential opportunities.
Jordan Sollof
Simon, yeah, that’s a very nice example and leads nicely on to the next question as well. Why is it so important for patients and families in particular?
Dr DJ Hamblin-Brown
(Well, again, I can come in here and just say that’s a fantastic story, Simon. And I think if I can just say that in the emergency department, which I spend most of my time clinically, the amount of time that we spend trying to coordinate care for people who’ve come in for exactly the same reason is huge. I mean, I would say potentially half of my clinical time is spent doing exactly what you’ve described, Simon.
So there’s a possibility if your ambulance crew were not as assiduous as they had been in this case, they might have gone, oh, this is a nightmare. Let’s just bring this woman in to deal with this as quickly as we can. The woman’s obviously a threat to herself, a threat to others.
Let’s take her to the hospital for a safe place. And then we would have spent five hours trying to work out what was going on. And she would have sat in our waiting room and potentially caused all sorts of trouble.
And so that wouldn’t have been good for her and it wouldn’t have been good for us or anybody else. So I think it’s these sorts of things about working out where a patient needs to go next. What’s the answer to the question?
You know, what happens next? It requires good information to be shared and not all the information, but just pertinent information across these boundaries that exist in the healthcare system. And so that answers, I hope, the question that you’ve asked, Jordan, which is, you know, why is it important for families and patients?
It’s because they don’t get the care they need at the time they need it. And it costs more money. It costs a lot of time and effort in the example that you’ve given, Simon.
I mean, that’s a massive cost. And the patient isn’t getting what they need at the time they need it. And almost all of the care coordination problems that we see are largely around this inability to move things on quickly enough.
And that has a knock-on effect on people’s health. Because if you’re waiting for some sort of clinical coordination decision and it takes days rather than hours, you can deteriorate, you can suffer from significant anxiety, you can spend a lot of time, you know, managing and trying to navigate the healthcare system in the same way. So I think it’s hugely important.
Especially as things get more and more complicated for patients.
Simon Weldon
Yeah, I completely agree, DJ. And I’d answer the question, I suppose, in two ways. The first is, it’s kind of, isn’t it just the decent human thing to do?
It’s what we would want for ourselves and our families. You know, when you ring up, there’s probably no more… I mean, we’ve all had this, right? There’s probably no more frustrating experience than sitting on the end of a phone line, waiting for somebody to answer what are often very simple questions.
What’s going on here? What do you know? What can I do? What comes next?
So there is something about the innate decency that underpins coordination. We often talk about it from an economic point of view, and it absolutely has an economic dimension.
But I think it’s just about what the value of the NHS should be about. We shouldn’t keep people waiting because, you know, it reduces anxiety, it improves people’s quality of care, let alone the fact that then it’s more efficient. Because as DJ said, I was incredibly impressed by the paramedic practitioner who was sitting there.
I was obviously not in any caregiving role. My role there was to observe and I had a secondary role making cups of tea for about two hours, which kept sort of some of the lid on the anxiety. But that paramedic practitioner had to be so patient, not only with the patient, kind of explaining what was going on to them, but also patient with multiple different calls that had to explain, I’m ringing up because, and just imagine a world in which we had the iPad, because the irony was she had an iPad with her in front of her that could have provided her all of that information in one place.
But instead, all we could do was ring over and over again until we track down the right people. So my arguments are, it’s the decent thing to do. It is as important to people in terms of the quality of care that they experience as some of the clinical aspects that they get delivered.
And it just has a huge economic home cost to the efficiency of the health service.
Jordon Sollof
That’s great. Yeah, we’ll come on to why exactly clinical coordination is quite difficult to achieve and some of those specific challenges and maybe examples of best practice. But I want to ask first, kind of how is all of this relevant to the Labour government’s new policy agenda?
Simon Weldon
So, I mean, many of us now have read the Darzi report. And so I think it’s important here for your listeners to draw out probably the three underpinning big themes that came out from the analysis that I think are going to be really important for the generation of the new ten-year plan. So we’re talking a really interesting intersection where the whole health service is gearing itself up to respond to the Darzi report and create a new ten-year plan.
So I would encourage everybody, because I know that there’s going to be a massive engagement exercise, your listeners, all of our colleagues in the health service, patients, patient groups, to start thinking about these challenges that I’m about to describe. So the first one is from hospital to community. So here we’re thinking about the fact that although there’s been a challenge to which everybody’s known about for ages, that we’re spending more in a hospital setting rather than a community setting.
And there’s been this aspiration to move services from hospital to community. Successive governments have not managed to achieve that aim. And it is still true today, as it was 10, 15, 20 years ago, that we spend more of the NHS budget in a hospital-based setting than we do in a community-based setting. Big challenge number one.
Big challenge number two, from sickness to prevention for the health service to be successful in the future. Prevention, which is arguably the dog that hasn’t barked in all of the last plans that have been published nationally, now needs to become a reality.
And the third challenge, which I argue would enable the first two from analogue to digital. And so it is true today that a significant challenge in the health service is that there is still wide amounts of variation in terms of what the technological enabling of health care is between organisations, in organisations, across systems. And if we don’t solve… my argument would be if we don’t solve that one, we don’t solve the analogue to digital shift, then we won’t be able to do the other two as well as we would like.
So I think those three challenges are at the heart of the policy agenda. And for the purposes of this discussion, I make the argument that the third one – from analogue to digital – is critical to actually delivering the other two. And we will probably get on to as we talk about why hasn’t that worked in the past.
Because, you know, none of these thoughts are new. That’s the other challenge. So how are we going to avoid repeating some of the issues that we’ve had in the past?
Jordan Sollof
Thanks, Simon. DJ, anything to add there?
Dr DJ Hamblin-Brown
No, I think that’s very eloquently put. And I think those and the nice summary of the conclusions. And I think I think you’re absolutely right, Simon, the challenges, the third is enabling all of these great ideas with the new technology that is now available to us.
I think we haven’t had a great experience of digitisation in the NHS. It’s had its false starts. We have we have done quite well in the last 10 years, I guess, compared to how it started with the National Programme for IT and so on.
So I think we’ve got a great opportunity now as technology is improved to deliver those first two challenges. And I know they are really about coordination, really, aren’t they? That’s precisely what they’re about.
Jordan Solloff
Absolutely. Yeah.
And shameless plug for our most recent episode of Digital Fund Plugged, which was kind of focused a bit on a news team episode on the Darzi report and some of those digital and technology aspects. Obviously, the podcast title is on the challenges of clinical coordination. Before we get on to some of those specific challenges, why exactly is it difficult to achieve now? Is there the top kind of few things that have made it so hard so far to get it right?
Dr DJ Hamblin-Brown
If I can jump in first and just say that my view is precisely… it’s a good segue from that last point about digitisation, which is why is it hard is because the systems that we have don’t support –the short answer. 0So we end up doing things analogue. You know, I’m surprised in a way, Simon, you didn’t say that somebody sent you sent a fax at some point!
You know, we rely on these systems, which have been commissioned by individual parts of the NHS. And I think the reason it’s hard is because there’s been a mental model of digitisation, which says that each individual trust or individual organisation within the NHS has to commission their own digitisation and they have their own transformation teams and their own digitisation teams and their own… So if you go to any one trust, you’ll find people whose job it is, is to digitise their part of the system.
And so the commissioning of digital services, for want of a better way of putting it, has been left to the individual parts of the NHS. And as a result, unsurprisingly, you get digital systems which sort of don’t join up. So I think the difficulty is because we haven’t yet found ways of commissioning digital services, which seamlessly and easily, that’s the key thing, join these things up.
There tends to be when people commission digital services, which join things up, they tend to take very large silos of data and put them into a bigger silo. And that isn’t necessarily the same thing as improving clinical coordination. It’s more like creating a silo of silos or a data lake.
A data lake doesn’t create coordination. Coordination comes from systems which help you do that coordination. And there hasn’t been a body in the NHS, to my understanding, with that remit.
That’s my feeling as to why it’s been hard so far. Would you agree with that, Simon?
Simon Weldon
Yeah, I would. I mean, I think we value, we have valued organisational sovereignty in the NHS over collective good at times. And I think the digital agenda is a really good case in point.
One of the challenges about how we answer the analogue to digital shift that Darzi invites us to contemplate is to what extent do we standardise and to what extent do we allow individual organisations to continue to plough their own furrow? And I think we’ve got to go far more to the former than the latter. If you were to paint a picture, it’s almost like sometimes what we’ve allowed is every single organisation has its own version of the Windows operating system or the Mac operating system to be even handed, you know.
And we’ve almost allowed a thousand flowers to bloom. And in doing that, we have not put the patient at the centre of the journey. What we’ve done is we’ve put the organisation at the centre of the journey.
And I think that has significantly impeded progress. And there are all sorts of quite deep cultural reasons, but I think one of them would be often patients think that the NHS is one homogenised organisation, but it’s not. It’s actually probably more of a federation of organisations affiliated under the same big blue banner.
And if we don’t get that argument or that balance right in the new plan, then we will again miss the opportunity.
I’m going to give one cause for optimism here. I think another reason why we haven’t made the progress is probably until relatively recently, the technology that was available couldn’t scale or be distributed in the way that the promise of it suggested.
But I actually think now some of the things that I’m seeing and experiencing give a genuine promise that if we do it in the right way, the technology now is available at scale to really make a difference. And so that’s why I think we shouldn’t be downhearted about the difficulties. Those are some of the historic difficulties.
One of them, the coordination difficulty, the organisational sovereignty difficulty, for sure, remains. But I think if we’re brave enough, the technology now exists to actually make a difference in a way that probably never does before. And probably the principal place that I think that difference can be made is we can engage the patient in that technology far more than we would have been able to do five or 10 years ago.
And I think key to success is bringing patients into the conversation. And one other point that I think people often forget, we don’t actually train NHS staff to be digitally literate. And I think that’s really important.
So people are actually, although they won’t say it, quite scared of some of this stuff. And if we’re going to create a digitally enabled NHS, let’s not forget that deep training for our clinicians of all stripes and colours is going to be key. Because otherwise, we will just get the same. Oh, I’ve always done it like this. Therefore, I can only do it like this. (21:56)
Jordon Sollof
That’s great.
Yeah. Certainly, Darzi says as well, there’s still reasons to be optimistic that the NHS, the vital signs are still working and it can kind of bounce back if you like. So plenty of reasons to be optimistic in my view.
And we’ll come on to some more specific challenges around clinical coordination. But first of all, there are examples of best practice that you’ve come across where clinical coordination is done well that you can share with our listeners.
Dr DJ Hamblin-Brown
Well, I think I would just say that in secondary care, where you’ve got multiple teams working together to support a particular patient pathway, and they exist within a unitary organisation, it can be done extremely well. So for instance, the fractured neck of FEMA pathway for patients in a complex trust can be done extremely well. And that requires lots of multi-professional teams working well together.
So I think we know that good clinical coordination can be done, providing you have the right, if you like, leadership structure over the pathway that you’re talking about. I can’t think of any great examples of where it’s done between organisations, perhaps in some cancer care it’s good.
I know where we work in Kent, the Kent Oncology Centre has a great system for managing multi-professional teams. So it’s not all bleak. Simon, maybe you’ve got some better examples than I have.
Simon Weldon
Yeah, I would say probably in general terms, when you look out at the NHS, the cancer care pathways are some of the most advanced in terms of bringing the professionals to the patient rather than other ways, rather than the patient having to shuttle between things. But I’ll give an example from the ambulance sector, if I may.
So we’re opening hubs in our communities. We serve the populations of Kent, Surrey, Sussex and Frimley. And in each of those areas, we’re opening hubs and those hubs are bringing together clinicians in the service of patients.
So literally clinicians come to a room together. And when an ambulance call comes in, either pre-dispatch or pre-conveying, the call comes to the hub and the clinicians sit there and discuss, is there an alternative to taking that patient to hospital? And the magic happens when people actually, clinicians actually sit in a room together and say, no, we could do this, we could do that. You don’t need to take this patient to hospital.
Because oftentimes when a call comes in for a paramedics, the paramedics are the only people on a particular scene and they have minutes at most to make a judgement. And it’s the real proper equivalent to phone an expert friend. And the expert friend is like almost a consultant in your pocket and they can say we don’t need to do this. We don’t need to do that.
And where we’ve opened this service in Kent and we’re spreading it out now, we think to date we’ve saved about 1300 admissions to hospital, 1300 conveyances, which I think is a model for the future. Even in its prototype form, it suggests that coordination can yield significant benefits.
So that’s my example that gives me hope. And I think we’ve got a lot more to do in that space. The sad thing, as we’re on a digital podcast, would be to say, as I sat behind the clinicians watching them work on these patients, all of them had their laptops open and all of them had different systems on their laptops that they were using to find out, we know this patient, do we need to do something different because we know and so on and so forth.
So there’s a huge amount further to travel here, but we’ve got to be optimistic about the fact that magic can happen in the NHS. Magic does happen in the NHS on a daily basis, and it involves people coming together and breaking out of those organisational silos. So that’s my cause for hope.
Dr DJ Hamblin-Brown
I think that’s a really brilliant and exciting example. Of something which is clinically good, great for the patient and clearly is going to save costs. The other examples where I was thinking about this idea of getting clinicians together, of course, MDTs, not just cancer MDTs, but there are plenty of other MDTs, good examples of where you’re bringing different mindsets, you bring diversity of clinical experience to the same patient to help get the best outcome for them.
So we do it well using MDTs, just that, you know, people don’t think of MDTs as being coordination systems, but they are, and I think we can build on those as well.
Jordon Sollof
Absolutely, we’ve touched on a little bit, but onto those specific challenges. What are the main problems you think that arise when it comes to trying to achieve clinical coordination? What are those barriers that maybe we haven’t overcome yet?
Simon Weldon
Shall I start here? I think the one that is going to be really uppermost in a lot of people’s minds like me is what’s the investment? So the last government set aside a fund, people will probably recall it, about £3.5bn to turbocharge the investment, and there’s no doubt that making the changes that we need is not a cost free, it’s not a cost-free good.
We can’t do it building off the existing systems. And to DJ’s earlier point, we have to remember that even some of the core infrastructure is in some cases in some organisations very weak. So there is a levelling-up component to the investment that will need to be faced into.
And so we all do a digital maturity assessment and that has shown quite significant variations between organisations and their capabilities. And then there will need to be, what is the investment case? Because there will need to be national investment in this.
It may not be visible investment, but it is investment that is, I think, should be regarded as a core part of our national infrastructure. It was interesting recently that the government designated some of the national data centres as core infrastructure. And I think we should be doing the same for the NHS IT and digital architecture and see it as a national asset, because if we do, it will fundamentally shift our mindset about what is required in order to get to the very best.
So those are the two points I would make in terms of starting that conversation. DJ, what do you think?
Dr DJ Hamblin-Brown
I think that I completely agree. And actually, I thought of three things, one of which is innovation. And I think you’ve mentioned that you need to fund innovation and that investment is coming.
But I think that the segue from that is, what do you innovate? What innovations do you adopt? And I think that there is a disconnect between the people who purchase and manage innovation and the people who use the innovations that they try and implement.
And so the difference between the user and the purchaser creates a disconnect. There’s a fundamental need for users to have better systems. And it’s not always the purchasers who know what those systems should be.
And that, I think, is a challenge, which is that disconnect is really hard to overcome, because you can’t give the users the purchasing power, at least I don’t think you can. And often, you can’t give the purchasers the day-to-day front-line experience of what it’s like to use that particular system.
So I’m not sure that I know what the answer to that is. But the other problem is that there’s risk aversion in the NHS to innovation and to doing things differently. Perhaps less than there was, but I think people don’t necessarily get rewarded for trying things and failing. And if we able to make people more open to moving the needle and testing things, that would be helpful.
So, trying to overcome some of the inertia that exists in a relatively conservative industry. I don’t know if that makes much sense.
Jordon Sollof
In terms of those challenges, what are some of the solutions to those questions. I know it’s a difficult question, but any solutions? And in terms of digital and technology, what role does that play? Is there almost some unlocked potential in terms of digital achieving clinical coordination?
Simon Weldon
I think one of the solutions is organisations being prepared to collaborate. So I work as part of a collaboration of ambulance services across the South and one of the areas we chosen to collaborate on is the digital and AI agenda. We think there’s great potential for AI technology to help with our call handling in the future.
But we know that if we try and do that on our own, our expertise is not sufficient – we don’t have the scale, the organisational muscle to do that on our own. So collaboration is going to be a key organisational competency in this space in order to help us deliver solutions that work at scale.
And it obviously has an ancillary benefit if we’re all working in the same space we can standardise that product rollout, whatever it may be. And I think that’s a key part of the solution – you’ve got to be willing to collaborate.
And again it comes back to organisational sovereignty, which has been the default model for the NHS for most of its 78 years, is not going to be the default model.
We all live in complex ecosystems that are weblike and if we don’t understand and appreciate that we will struggle to get any further traction on any of those solutions.
One other thing I’ll throw onto the table, because I obviously sit around board tables. I made the point earlier that technology has come on in leaps and bounds in the last ten years and I think we underestimate the fact that raising the level of board literacy about this topic is another really key part of the solution space.
DJ was indicating it – people need to be intelligent customers, otherwise you go for what you know. So I think boards investing time and effort in thinking about what do we need to know in this agenda is as important as spending time on the quality of care, on the money and delivery.
It is a core organisational competency with all the overheads that come there. So my solution space for investment would be collaboration is a necessity. Board investment in terms of time and effort is a competency. And I’d say a CDIO, or whatever they may be called, having that lead of the conversation across the organisation becomes key too.
Jordan Sollof
Thanks Simon. DJ?
Dr DJ Hamblin-Brown
I will build, if I may, on that point about boards, which is we’re very fortunate in that a few years ago the previous government instituted the integrated care boards and integrated care systems. We now have the, for want of a better word, the infrastructure within the NHS to make that happen.
So with the 42 ICBs, I think your point Simon about getting board literacy and getting boards to really take this literally – the key boards to do that would be the ICBs. Because once they get their teeth into proper solutions for clinical coordination at the ICS level – the level of the integrated care system – then I think a lot of the problems that we’re seeing will go away.
And I think those boards need to be brave and take some risks about how they try and solve this problem because there isn’t a template out there that says oh all you need to do is do these five things and its done. There actually don’t know how to do it and those boards need to try things.
They need to try and move fast in iterating potential solutions for this. I think that’s one of the problems, sometimes the NHS takes a really long time to make a decision. By the time they’ve made a decision, the world has moved on. So those ICBs are critical.
Simon Weldon
Yeah, I agree. And the other thing I’ll add is certainty about funding, not just upfront investment but investment over the longer term. Because many of the products and approaches take time to implement – they have phases, they have generations. And I think we haven’t had certainty in the capital environment for the NHS. It’s been one-year cycles.
And another thing I think the new government needs to grapple with is what messaging are they going to create around the longer term that allows organisations to take those risks. Because you become risk averse when you don’t know the future. Because naturally you don’t want to place a bet that you don’t think you can honour.
And so we’re going to have to get into this space of thinking what does the longer term funding environment look like particularly from a capital angle.
Jordon Sollof
Thanks Simon. You just mentioned that we don’t know the future. That’s exactly what I ask now about predictions – get the crystal balls out, if you like! In terms of clinical coordination, what do you see for the months and years ahead? An increase in the adoption of technology across the board? Do you see improvements in the NHS? Or are we still a long way off where we want and need to be?
Dr DJ Hamblin-Brown
I’ll let Simon have the last word, so I’ll say very briefly that I’m actually very positive about this because I think there’s a lot of innovation out there and I think there’s a lot of movement towards improving clinical coordination because it’s a necessity. And I think the NHS will solve the problem because we can. And we will because it’s becoming a necessity. So I’m optimistic that we’ll get it sorted over the next few years somehow.
Simon Weldon
I share that optimism. I’ll offer three potential visions of the future. One, I think we’ve only just touched sides of the NHS app and what it is capable of. So I there needs to be that conversation. I think the app is quite constrained in terms of what you could encourage citizens to do with it.
And I think that leads into a second point, which is one of the big resets is what are the rights you have as a citizen to access the NHS, what responsibilities do you have as a citizen. And I think that plays into this agenda. So, for example, does the NHS become a default app for accessing parts of the NHS – booking appointments, etc, etc. Rather than the traditional, very analogue systems that we have.
And the third area, going back to where we started this conversation from – clinical coordination. We know that far too many people in the NHS sit in hospital beds for far too long because people are, for understandable reasons, risk averse. I’m not sure the answer is more beds in the NHS, though we are relatively under-bedded compared to some of our European counterparts. I’m absolutely sure that clinical coordination could deliver huge benefits in terms of length of stay in hospitals, which would in turn, free up some of the resources, that we know are badly overstretched at the moment.
So my sense of optimism is absolutely there and I’m really looking forward to seeing what the next ten-year plan has to offer.
Jordan Sollof
Yeah, certainly – there are plenty of reasons to be optimistic. Brilliant! We’ve flown to the end of the episode, I think. Lots to take away from that on clinical coordination, the difficulties around how it can be achieved. My sincere thanks go to DJ and Simon for taking the time to come onto the podcast and for speaking so well.
Thanks everyone for listening. We shall return soon with another episode for you. Until then, take care.
