The age-old problems of too little time, money, capacity and often capability are being exacerbated by the increased pressures from a pandemic and newly emerging macroeconomic and political issues.
Coupled with a desperate need to keep people away from the hospital “front door” as a result, or perhaps more correctly to keep focused only on those that need to be there, things show no current sign of getting better. A still disparate Health and Care system, formed of many previously competing and separate parts, continues therefore to create huge inefficiencies, increased clinical risk and waste across the whole economy.
Integrated Care Systems are the answer to this problem at present, but they will only stand a chance to work if given the power and money to achieve their goal of better joined up care.
The subsequent inability to focus, make decisions and mature are therefore preventing meaningful progress. This is at times causing almost complete paralysis within the NHS. There is some good news however, in that if we can get the attention of people for long enough to ultimately digitise the right things, then we have a chance of unlocking some of these bottlenecks.
Through, for example, improved data accessibility, improved clinical and operational insight (allowing clinicians to safely scale and prioritise), more efficient working and better risk management, we can indeed begin to do this.
A fully integrated Electronic Patient Record, information that allows the customer to get ahead of issues before they become “acute events”, automation that removes unnecessary laborious manual process and solutions that effectively quantify and mitigate risk at a truly organisational level begin to help do this.
Along with critical core IT infrastructure and Managed Services, this is what SCC and our partners do. Our objective is simple, to help ensure that the right data is with the right people at the right time - enabling more effective decisions at the point of care and then allowing patients to move more efficiently through the Health and Care system.
All this needs to be done though in a sustainable and ethical way, that supports the Net Zero agenda and delivers high levels of social value. SCC are completely committed to these things, continually evolving and challenging ourselves in this space, and introducing key new roles and activities into our business to effectively support them.
The combined result of all of this is real and significant change, with and alongside our customers; evidenced in part by our Healthcare business slogan “With you for change". This guides our own team behaviours and principles for delivery.
We ultimately view ourselves as a Technology company, using consultancy to get customers to the point at which change is realised by its appropriate use, more quickly and more safely than if we were not involved.