“The Government announced an additional £200 million to boost resilience within the NHS. Whilst this will help to increase hospital bed capacity as we head into the winter months, it is simply not enough to establish long-term, sustainable resilience within the NHS beyond the winter.
The Government should be prioritising addressing underlying structural issues such as reviewing its system architecture to shift its pathway capacity to be more innovation-friendly, thereby transforming patient care and improving efficiency.
At present, an NHS hospital uses half a million products a year, there should be more focus on reducing the size of the catalogue and collecting more data on the supply chain to aid the resistance of the system and deliver the best possible care for patients. There should also be more focus on addressing the skills gap in transformative technologies, this would massively facilitate growth and ease the time it takes for products to be adopted within the system.
Short-term funding is useful, but the NHS road to resilience is a long-term project that needs to be built over time with the correct structural foundations to withstand ongoing pressures.”
Ellie Kearney, Director of External Affairs at the Health Tech Alliance