DIGITISATION
Unlocking the NHS 10 Year Health Plan
The government’s plan for the NHS is a huge document. Jane Stephenson, chief executive officer at digital engagement and patient experience solutions provider Spark TSL, argues the key to unlocking its digital ambitions is to consider what it has to say about the shift from CDs to streaming. She argues the challenge facing Trusts and health boards is to make a similar shift from physical to digital delivery, while working with the right partners to make the most the opportunities this will open up – lowering costs, and improving both staff and patient satisfaction.
The government has published the 10 Year Health Plan that it says will deliver ‘radical change’ in the NHS and create a more local, more personalised experience for patients. The plan, titled Fit for the Future, is a big document. Online, it runs to more than 160 pages, across nine sections, an executive summary, and an afterword by Health and Social Care secretary Wes Streeting. So, it’s important to find a way in. One of the things that struck me was a panel a third
of the way through, which talks about using digital to improve financial sustainability, by doing more work in the community and digitally, to reduce reliance on traditional – but expensive – care pathways. To make its case, the panel draws a parallel with the
Below: Digital units deliver entertainment, communication, and information to patients.
Right: Devices can provide patients with information about their treatment, discharge and rehabilitation.
changes we have seen in other areas of our lives over the past 20 years. It says that ‘in other industries, digital technology has fundamentally disrupted the status quo
[…] listening to music no longer requires the manufacture of a physical CD, its distribution to shops, or the costs of physical retail space. Higher convenience, at a far low unit cost’.
Built to support digital delivery Why did this panel stand out? Well, Spark TSL was created to bring about exactly this disruption. We set out to deliver Wi-Fi to areas where it was hard to deploy, and to help businesses to use that connectivity to deliver digital services to their users. We started out in marinas and now work in shopping centres and conference centres. If you’ve logged into free Wi-Fi at an event, via a homepage filled with location information, that could well have been us. But we have developed a specialist health practice since we started working with a major London trust 20 years’ ago. Almost every hospital trust and health board in England and Scotland now uses Spark Connect Wi-Fi, our patient engagement solution, or the bedside units that we acquired with Hospedia, towards the end of the COVID-19 pandemic. We are also starting to see Trusts adopt the Spark
Fusion platform that we have been promoting into the NHS, since acquiring and enhancing it from the Sentean Group in the Netherlands, where it is used by leading hospitals to put productivity and patient apps into the hands of staff and patients. For example, the Jeroen Bosch Ziekenhuis in ‘s-Hertogenbosch in the Netherlands, has rolled out Spark Fusion on 600 Apple iPads. The development has streamlined workflows and enabled the hospital to achieve top wellbeing ratings by prioritising patient health and satisfaction.
Analogue to digital Another reason that the panel stood out is that it shows the move from analogue to digital is not a one off. One innovation tends to lead to others. It was the digitisation of music, so it could be burned onto a CD, that paved the way for the streaming services we use today. What changed was the delivery mechanism: eventually
the CD was released in 1982, and Spotify didn’t arrive for another quarter of a century. Back in the day, the Hospedia units were revolutionary. They did away with payphones in hospital corridors and TVs that had to be wheeled onto wards, so every patient could watch the same programme. However, those units date from the era of the CD, and
they have had their time. Since we acquired Hospedia, we have been encouraging Trusts and their charities to
164 Health Estate Journal October 2025
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