Research project
Surgical Care Observatory (HealthTech Research Centre in Accelerated Surgical Care)
- Start date: 14 October 2024
- End date: 14 October 2029
- Principal investigator: Professor Helen Hughes
- Research Fellow and Surgical Observatory Project Manager: Emma Findlay
Description
One in ten people need surgery each year, but waiting times are at an all-time high with 7.2 million people awaiting routine treatment. This means people are living with prolonged symptoms, added anxiety, and employment issues, in addition to paying for additional care. This affects the quality of life for patients, carers, and their families.
Demand for hospital care is limited by the availability of acute care beds with over thirteen thousand patients occupying beds (one-seventh of total NHS bed capacity) who are medically fit but don’t have access to suitable community and social care support.
Technology can help to address these problems by, for instance, making surgical care pathways more efficient, or by enabling greater precision and decision making during surgical activity.
But uptake of technologies into routine care is slow with only a small number making it and benefiting patients.
To address these challenges, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) HealthTech Research Centre (HRC) in Accelerated Surgical Care aims to help the best new technologies find their way into surgical pathways within the National Health Service (NHS) more quickly and effectively.
The HRC in Accelerated Surgical Care is a collaboration between the University of Leeds and the Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust, and is co-directed by co-directed by Vee Mapunde and Professor David Jayne.
As part of the HRC, we (Professor Helen Hughes and Emma Findlay) are leading the Surgical Care Observatory work package. Our aim is to uncover clinical areas that will benefit from new technology, and develop methods and tools so that we can identify and select technologies with the greatest potential to improve surgical care and benefit patients.
This work is vital since it will ensure that the NHS prioritises and adopts solutions that best meet the needs of users, and which are cost-effective, implementable, and scalable.
How are we approaching this challenge?
Technological opportunities within surgery continue to develop at pace, but not all technologies are equal. Some technologies can ‘plug and play’ within the existing health system, while others require major system overhaul to deliver effectively, including a change to culture and behaviours, roles and work systems.
There also needs to be ‘pull’ for these new technologies amongst the NHS employees, patients, and carers, who will use them, so it is important that we work closely with these different stakeholders to understand the perceptions and beliefs that they hold, in relation to how such technologies would work in practice.
Successful prioritisation and implementation of surgical technologies is therefore a socio-technical challenge for the NHS. Technology innovations cannot be separated from the dynamic, multi-faceted and complex healthcare system in which they will be embedded. These factors must be understood and factored into prioritisation and implementation of novel technologies to fully reap the clinical and organisational outcomes intended.
Areas of Focus
To achieve this, we focus on understanding the socio-technical implications of new technologies and how we can better prioritise new technological solutions with these in mind. The work is structured around how we can support and understand these aspects, and jointly optimise them to facilitate successful implementation.
There are three primary areas of focus within the Surgical Care Observatory:
Horizon scanning: We will work with internal and external stakeholders to gain a deep understanding of the way surgical technology is currently scanned for and prioritised within the NHS. Analysis will be undertaken to identify areas of improvement, and a report will be produced that provides a toolkit for surgical horizon scanning going forward.
Needs analysis: We will conduct socio-technical stakeholder analysis to identify un-met clinical and organisational needs within the NHS. We will work on case studies to explicate un-met needs and adoption pathways.
System readiness: Through multi-case analysis, we will develop a novel system readiness scoring tool that will support the ongoing prioritisation and implementation of technology by categorising incoming technologies based on their system change requirements.
This project is funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).