The pandemic has put health systems under strain. Systems already struggled with several obstacles that have been magnified because of COVID-19.
Problems such as waiting lists have reached a record high with 6.5 million people waiting for treatment.
In fact, according to the Ipsos survey, this is one of the main concerns for citizens. Other concerns that stand out are the lack of staff and the overload, the poor pay for NHS staff, the poor emergency response/ambulance times, the lack of beds, and the lack of resources and investment.
These concerns are beginning to have real consequences. According to the Standard Evening 117,000 people have died while on the NHS waiting list.
Figures revealed via freedom information requests from the Labour Party to every NHS trust show an estimation of 116,667 people that have died waiting for care. The double of number of deaths than before the pandemic.
In the words of Wes Streeting, shadow health secretary, to that media: ‘ I think it underlines not just that we have got the highest record waiting lists in the history of the NHS but sadly this is also a matter of life and death.’
However, despite all these obstacles and concerns, only 26% of the population is bothered by the poor quality of care/treatment from the NHS.
These data show that the real problem, and what worries citizens, is not the quality of care, but what it really takes to achieve it when it is needed.
It is time not only to alleviate these concerns but also to provide tools to help those who are really making a titanic effort to care for patients – the healthcare professionals.
Healthcare digitization is not the absolute solution, but it is the boost the healthcare system needs to overcome such important burdens as waiting lists.
It is vital to eliminate workload, not only by getting more professionals but also by reducing tasks that generate bottlenecks and take health workers away from their fundamental task, health care.
With process orchestration and automation tools, it is possible to streamline healthcare management. Eliminate manual tasks, improve coordination and communication between teams, optimize resource management and, in short, increase surgical efficiency.
With our solution for the surgical block, ORvital, it is possible to achieve an increase of more than 15% in surgical performance, which would be equivalent to a year of 13 months.
In fact, East Kent Hospitals University NHS Foundation Trust is the first hospital in the UK to use our solution. A tool that in the words of Alexis Warman, Service Development Lead, East Kent Hospitals University NHS FT “reduces the reliance and resource pressure on the staff to input the information manually and provides us with a wholly precise recording of every stage of the patient’s theatre journey.”
