Can the UK Fix its Health Service?

The NHS (National Health Service) in the UK is regarded by many British people as ‘the jewel in the crown’ – by far the most important public service.  Over the last decade, though, there has been increasing disappointment with the state of the service – with the COVID pandemic putting a large nail in the coffin.  Though people still value the NHS for its convenience and its ‘free of charge at the point of use’ status, it is generally reported as, and regarded as, ‘broken’. Demand for its services is rising with an increased demand  (and lengthening waiting lists) for, in particular, mental health services.

So what can be done to fix the NHS .  ‘Throwing more money at it’ is the usual political solution – but a solution that never works … and almost certainly could never work.

Increasing, and improving the use of technology is one partial solution – and AI certainly seems to offer some potential to help. (The NHS uses and produces vast quantities of data and carries out a large amount of data analysis.)

Certainly it seems to an outsider that  the NHS has to change the way it does things, rather than simply attempting to do more stuff…. but the NHS should be looking for specific, focused technologies rather than trying to squeeze and mould existing or mainstream technologies to fit its own environment.

The NHS should be, and is, looking at developments elsewhere in both public and private health arenas – and in different contexts.

For example, many developing nations have been unable to copy western, high functioning, high infrastructure health services due to the very high set-up costs.  Yet they often construct services which meet many of their needs at far lower costs – often by using staff with shorter, cheaper qualifications.  (Despite recent trends in the use of ‘paramedic’ staff, the NHS still uses expensive, well-qualified doctors to diagnose and treat low level ailments.)

So, the NHS can be wholly or partially fixed but it may need to be  further (intentionally) broken to end up with a streamlined structure, a wider range of staffing levels and skills, more appropriate use of specialised technologies – and this will take  a massive political will to ‘attack’ the beloved NHS before rebuilding it.

The size of the NHS complicates the situation but such ‘turnarounds’ have been undertaken by failing, commercial organisations to show  that this is a difficult, though by no means impossible, mission.