By Louise Wall, founder and managing director, e18 Innovation
The 10-Year Plan makes it clear that the NHS cannot continue operating as it has been, it must modernise and adapt.
Rising demand, workforce shortages, and financial pressures mean the current model is unsustainable, and for too long, repetitive, manual processes have drained capacity from both NHS staff and finances.
To preserve the founding principles of the NHS, leaders need to rethink how services are delivered and how the private sector can play its part in enabling the Plan’s ambitions around workforce, productivity, and digital-first care.
We need a holistic approach that delivers the right solution, where it will deliver the biggest impact and sustained results.
Our focus has to be on maximising the skilled resources we have and using intelligent automation to relieve the pressure where it is most acute.
Finding the correct tech
I’ve spent 25 years in and around the NHS and, over time, I realised that the workforce crisis wasn’t going away.
That’s why I set up e18 ten years ago.
I knew that technology alone was never going to be the answer, so I didn’t set out to build a solution or choose one tool to back.
My starting point has always been understanding the critical issues and how to address them, including resourcing and financial pressures, workforce burnout, growing waiting lists and an increasing admin burden.
By staying vendor-agnostic and focused on those challenges, we can find the right tool to resolve the problem. It’s rarely a one-size-fits-all.
Change management and wraparound support are also vital for uptake and for achieving results.
Supporting the workforce
Across the whole economy, it is clear that happier, healthier staff deliver higher-quality work.
Beyond lower sickness absence, an
