Virtually Hospitalised
A National ‘Get-Well’ Plan?
The sense of ‘déjà vu’ (literally ‘already seen’) — the suspicion that you’ve been here before — can be astonishingly real. The experience may be entirely new, but that is not to say that you haven’t previously traveled this way, felt the same way, or physically endured a similar event. My dictionary, rather dismissively, associates such moments as induced by ‘exhaustion or mental disorder’.
Now recovering from the dreaded COVID, I may admit to exhaustion, but my mentals are definitely in good order — and I’ve just rummaged through archived files to prove it!
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When the emergency medic arrives, I am horizontal across the bedroom doorway. From her backpack of delights come a series of tools to treat the trauma. She travels alone, this medic of amazing talents and technological triumphs, full of the confidence and competence that comes only with thorough training — a scenario I could only have imagined a decade earlier — a scenario that I did imagine in detail when studying healthcare back in 2008.
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The challenge at that time had been to envisage a future for healthcare services that might absorb less than 100% of any nation’s entire resources. Whilst I dutifully paid homage to technological innovations, it had become clear that no amount of clever tech would ever be any sort of a complete answer. That realisation, for someone who had been a bit of a (very minor) telecoms pioneer, was a major admission — a sobering course correction. (More than a decade later I’d find myself berating Boris for his supposed ‘Promethean Faith’!)
In 2008, I was the default choice to provide insight into what was then regarded as an emergent field — Connected Health (‘E-Health’). I traveled to the UK interviewing health professionals, their suppliers, partners, academics, and NHS administrators. My findings were melded with studies in Finland, Sweden, France, and Netherlands and discussed at seminars in Barcelona, Milan, and Brussels and supervised by a senior professor based at the Applied Sciences University of Oulu, Finland.
Central to my findings in 2008 was ‘The Connected Health Continuum’ — a graphical illustration of the projected transition of health dependencies from medical professionals to individuals, families, and communities as ‘Co-producers of their Health, Care, and Wellbeing’ with increasing enablement of proactive Connected Health choices. The future of the NHS lay not so much in hospital building programs or yet more clever tech, or more beds, or vastly more doctors, but in a vastly deeper citizen engagement in societal health and shared responsibilities made possible by openly shared knowledge and systems integration — our collective ability to ‘make things that work with other things’. None of that implied redundancy for medical professionals, but every part of that focused on how their brilliant expertise was best deployed. As I noted at the time, 60% of NHS costs were incurred by just four ‘Long Term Conditions’ — each, in large part, reflecting society’s ills. But that was well before the first COVID epidemic placed huge strain on unprepared and non-integrated healthcare systems. The Media gorged on bed-blocking stories and trolley-filled corridors.
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But I am diagonally horizontal across the bedroom doorway — having been unbalanced by a calamity of COVID-induced coughing. I am raised by an electric-powered multi-layered inflatable patient lifting device, checked by a finger-clipped Oximeter for pulse and blood oxygen levels, and my patient records are updated via the medic’s laptop linked to a mobile network. But that was not all. Back in 2008, or even in 2021, I would probably have been stretchered to an ambulance and carted away to A&E for further checks and the queue for hospital admission. And today I am admitted — not to some distant hospital ward, but to my very own ‘virtual ward’ complete with observation chart, monitoring instructions and complementary Oximeter. The nurse calls twice a day by phone to check the observations. After just a few more days of steady recovery, I am finally ‘discharged’.
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Here was just a glimpse of what was envisaged in 2008. There are now countless examples of remote patient care, such as the heart monitor with the built-in SIM card that streams data routinely to cardiac specialists. Medical information services are now widely accessible compared to the ‘primitive’ sources back when the Internet was merely 20 years old. All of these everyday gadgets and systems are ubiquitous — their normality and effectiveness, the way they knit together, the interconnectedness of systems and co-production more than individual component innovation, is the real triumph. But that does not yet mean that all sectors of society are yet so well equipped. Persistent inequalities in education, connectivity, and poverty wreck the complete picture (as does criminal misinformation), but evolution continues. Younger souls expect more, disconnect less, and understand the power of collective action.
Now, at last, we can envisage a national get-well plan — leastways as far as health is concerned. The future of the UK’s NHS is assuredly in the hands of those who own it and use it. No, I hadn’t been here before — I’d only imagined it — but this time it was very, very, real.
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Notes:
This article is archived in the Governance section of the Groupe Intellex library — a resource for enquiring student minds.
