HEALTHCAR E DE LIVE RY
in twenty of them doing so for over a year and the number had already increased by half since 2015.4
The COVID pandemic only exacerbated the situation, with delays adding another 100,000 patients to ballooning waiting lists, doubling the number waiting longer than the 18 week target to some 1.5 million.5
Many
patients are now having to endure waiting times of a year or more.6
The COVID crisis
appears to have peaked, but the challenge of waiting lists is still mounting because the UK population is both growing and getting older. There are ways to prepare now for future crises, as well as the demographic challenges we can readily predict. The number of people aged 85 and over is expected to nearly double to 3.2 million over the next 40 years.7 As we age, we tend to need more ongoing healthcare, including ARMD.
Meanwhile, in the economic sphere, our rapid shift to online shopping has led to a steep fall in high street property prices, making highly accessible retail properties more affordable than ever. The advances in technology which underlie this shift are making it possible to bring ever more sophisticated health services to new locations.
Nearly one-in-seven retail properties lies empty, suffering the consequences of the
growth of online and out-of-town shopping.8 Falling commercial demand means that high street healthcare would come at a relatively low cost, added to the lower capital costs of repurposing existing buildings. It also avoids the problems of using existing hospital sites. Taking health services out of secondary care also helps hospitals do their core job, cutting unnecessary footfall and traffic. It also dramatically cuts the infection risk to
hospital patients whose immune systems are often compromised. This advantage was particularly obvious during the COVID crisis. Local healthcare spaces can form a bridge between centralised healthcare and personalised telehealth, both supporting the Government’s drive for more integrated care accessible to everyone.
Transforming experiences Patient experience can also be transformed by providing some of the services hospitals offer in alternative spaces, nearer to patients, without hampering the services hospitals do best. Taking outpatient appointments off-site allows for more welcoming spaces. Patients will feel more connected to healthcare which is more like walking into a shop than into the intimidating, alien environment of a large hospital.
Hospitals pose a particular problem for some more than others. People with autism and learning difficulties, for instance, can often struggle to navigate large, impersonal hospitals.
Hospitals could focus more on what they excel at while high street healthcare tackles what it does best at outpatient clinics. Beyond age-related macular degeneration, this could include day case procedures, non-acute diagnostic tests, physical therapy and help tackle substance use and mental health issues.
JANUARY 2022
Healthcare generally needs to be more accessible to people with mental impairments and older people. The high street is far more welcoming and accessible for everybody. Similarly, hospitals need to be accessible to all, especially as the UK population ages.
‘Uberising’ healthcare Shifting healthcare to the high street has the additional potential to integrate new technologies. Cutting-edge technology allows for appointments to be arranged and administered across multiple sites that patients can self access using QR codes. A healthcare unit can easily run one site in a hospital, for more intensive treatment, and another on the high street, both managed by the same system connecting patients by phone. Patients could pick the
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