Hospital of the future
It began with a video generated entirely through AI*, and ended with a roomful of people buzzing with energy and enthusiasm for transforming our hospitals.
In between, the possibilities that technology now offered all of us inspired dozens of colleagues from different professions and specialties to discuss what they could learn from each other about doing things differently.
Our interactive workshop on “the hospital of the future” didn’t quite design a blueprint for another building, but it did generate a host of ideas for improving the way we work on our existing sites.
Alistair Chesser, our group chief medical officer, concluded proceedings by exhorting everyone to go back to their wards and offices and think about what they could do to make our working environments better for us and our patients.
“The answers to many of the things that we struggle with on a daily basis are here in the room. The question is, what is stopping us? We have heard so many ideas today: let this be a catalyst for getting out of those habits that only cause us stress and transforming the way we work together.”
With doctors, nurses, allied health professionals (AHPs), managers and others from across our hospitals all represented at the event, Magda Smith, our deputy group CMO, said it was the first time in her career she had witnessed multi-professional co-operation on such scale.
Guest speaker Saffron Cordery, deputy chief executive of NHS Providers, gave an overview of the national context and its constraints, noting that a recent poll showed over half the public wanted more investment in the NHS.
The gathering at the Education Academy was the culmination of a series of seminars over the summer with doctors in training, education fellows, foundation doctors, speciality and specialist doctors, dentists, physician associates, pharmacists, healthcare scientists, advanced clinical practitioners, nurses and midwives (including students and assessors), AHPs and clinical informatics experts.
Among the topics covered were opportunities for training, overcoming bureaucratic barriers, easing the burden of administration, collaborating across professions, and empowering staff to make local changes, as well as exploiting the potential of new technology.
The conference organisers are now distilling the outputs into six key themes which will be shared in due course.
*The script was generated through ChatGPT, voiced over by artificial intelligence, and made into a film through Lumen5. Though as Louise Hicks, chief nursing informatics officer, noted: “To make AI work, you have to input information and insight.”