FUTURE HOSPITALS
How digital innovation is the key to tomorrow’s care
In the third in a series of HEJ articles from key personnel involved in the New Hospital Programme, NHP Deputy Clinical Director, Cheryl Riotto, outlines how provision of care in our future hospitals will be transformed to deliver maximum benefits to both patients, and the staff working in them.
The New Hospital Programme is about so much more than construction; we are responsible for delivering buildings that are clinically relevant and flexible for the future. The bottom line is that we need to create a better space for care, so it is important that we view new hospital builds as if we were the patients. We must address the critical
infrastructure risks posed. Many hospitals comprise new buildings that have been added to the existing estate, which can make patient flow very difficult. Traditional hospitals are quite broad, geographically, so you can walk miles (literally) from one department to another. We can reduce the time that patients spend moving from one area of care to another, and make hospitals a better place to work. We have a real opportunity to improve operational efficiency, and to learn from other hospital builds, and we will do much of this through digitisation.
Advancing integrated healthcare Digitisation is indeed key in improving patient experience, but it can also be used innovatively in terms of medical equipment and hospital construction. It is also key to advancing integrated healthcare. Essentially, we are interested in all future digital innovations – current and evolving – because this programme is for all future NHS builds. For example, we’re looking at virtual wards where more care can be delivered ‘virtually’, and clinical teams can monitor and advise patients in their homes, rather than have them physically visiting our sites. Looking after patients in the community became part of the norm during the pandemic, and it is one of the key lessons to come out of that experience – that a lot of services currently conducted face-to-
face in hospital can be done virtually in the community. So, we could run ‘control rooms’ for certain disease areas which can predominantly be managed from patients’ homes. For example, Cystic Fibrosis patients on triple therapy drugs arguably do not need to use hospital services, but can manage their conditions from home, monitored by a hospital hub team.
Managing more services in the community We would estimate that in a typical district general hospital 25% of services (and hospital beds) could be managed in the community in this way. That would release more time to tackle patient backlogs and, if the spaces within the hospital are flexible, allow hospitals to prioritise those patients who need secondary or tertiary care. From a patient’s perspective, this means they would only go to hospital if they absolutely needed to. There’s a huge opportunity in the digital space to successfully link patients’
Cheryl Riotto
Cheryl Riotto is a cardiothoracic-specialised trained Registered General Nurse (RGN) with extensive clinical and operational experience, having started her nursing career in the 1980s. She has worked in critical care, theatres, palliative care, surgical wards, transplant services, day ward services, cardiac rehabilitation, and outpatient services. She joined the New Hospital Programme in 2021, leading on patient, public, and professional engagement and co-creation, and developing new standards for clinical areas such as the move to standardised single patient rooms.
May 2023 Health Estate Journal 27
hospital and primary care records, so that information is shared for the benefit of the patient. This is also an opportunity to improve patients’ privacy and dignity, as well as improving our workforce’s experience of delivering care. There are so many opportunities to
transform services within hospitals, and we need to look at how we can design things differently – both the buildings and the way care is delivered – to ultimately help patients and staff.
n The scale of the Programme will call on the skills and expertise of companies of all sizes, across a broad range of sectors. Suppliers can register their interest by completing the New Hospital Programme – Supply Market Survey, at: https://
www.smartsurvey.co.uk/s/NHP-PIN/ Alternatively, if you would like to know more about the supply chain or future market engagement activity, please email the Supplier Markets Team at
nhp.suppliers@
nhs.net
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