PROCUREMENT
A new service being offered by the NHS Technology Adoption Centre, aimed at both health service professionals and technology providers, wants to ensure the best products are adopted more quickly and easily. NHE spoke to the Centre’s chief executive, Sally Chisholm.
B
udgets are being squeezed, change is diffi cult, and unintended disincentives
abound.
There are plenty of historic reasons why the NHS has been slow at implementing bet- ter healthcare technologies, and some new ones.
The new Generic Adoption Process (GAP), launched by the NHS Technology Adoption Centre (NTAC), is designed to help remedy this, alongside work being done by innova- tors across the NHS.
Sally Chisholm has been chief executive of NTAC since last spring, after earlier being director of the cardiac then stroke networks in Lancashire and Cumbria.
Evidence base
NHE spoke to her at NTAC’s Manchester offi ces to discuss the change that’s needed in the NHS – and how the GAP, launched this autumn, can help.
She said: “All the evidence is that, sadly, the NHS is very slow at adopting new technolo-
82 | national health executive Nov/Dec 11
gies. There have been a number of different reports over the years making that point: I particularly point people in the direction of the Cooksey Review in 2007, and also Sir Derek Wanless has done a number of dif- ferent reports where he has talked about the problems.”
NTAC itself was established because of that “poor reputation”, she said, especially in light of the Healthcare Industries Task Force (HITF) report in the middle part of the last decade.
Chisholm explained: “The reasons for non- adoption are very complicated but pretty standard: you see them time and time again, regardless of the technology.
“It can be because of the fundamentals of the way that NHS care is paid for: for ex- ample, if the tariff doesn’t cover the cost for a hospital of introducing a new technology, there’s a disincentive there. Alternatively, you can have something that would have great patient outcomes and reduce the length of time somebody stays in hospital, or even prevent somebody going to hos- pital, but again, what’s the incentive for a hospital trust – from a very hard-nosed business perspective – to do something that’s going to lose them money? That’s a great disincentive.”
Change
“To use a new technology, there often needs to be quite a big redesign of the way people work. That’s time-consuming and it
“We’ve given examples from our previous work of business cases, costing templates, communication plans – all of those sorts of things. The whole point about it is, in a
needs quite a skillset to bring a whole clini- cal team with you to be able to make that change.
“Sometimes people are reluctant to change or are wary of technology.
“There can be reams of evidence about how effective a product is, but it’s sometimes quite diffi cult to evaluate it and make a de- cision about how robust it is. That’s one of the roles of NICE, and where they’re very strong, they really do understand the evi- dence base, but they don’t have the capac- ity to look at the hundreds of potential new technologies available.”
The GAP captures the processes that virtu- ally always need to be done to implement a new technology, and lets people know how to go about it, through an online, fi ve-step tool and ‘questionnaire’ type tools that tai- lor specifi c answers to the user.
Chisholm explained: “The GAP also gives users the analytical tools to help them as- sess, if they’ve already started a project, whether they’ve done the groundwork they need to do. At the same time, every NHS organisation introducing something new will be expected to produce a business case, and although every organisation has a different business case template, broadly you’ll see the same things in there.
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