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Leave a comment Posted on October 2, 2015 Patient Talk, Social media

Millions fear end of current healthcare says recent research. How technology might fill the gap.

Chris Millington of Doro

Concerns about the NHS and its future are so great for almost 40% of the population that they fear it won’t even exist when they reach old age.

That’s according to new research released today which saw almost 60% say they are worried the NHS won’t be able to look after them when they get older, with 41% saying budget cuts have them fearing for the future of the health service.

More than 40% surveyed by Doro also say they worry about Britain’s ageing population will mean for health care in years to come.

More than one in five have even more immediate concerns about whether the NHS will even be able to care for their parents or elderly relatives.

And with one in seven worrying they won’t have the money to care for their parents or elderly relatives when the time comes and one in ten concerned they won’t have the time, the study raises questions over just who will look after our ageing population.

Almost a third also worry about how isolated their parents may become when they get older, while around 40% believe technology is contributing to isolation instead of helping them feel more connected and supported.

However, with more than half of respondents saying their elderly relatives now use at least one form of smart technology such as smart phones, social media, or tablets, could the growing number of apps, monitoring services and websites dedicated to health actually be a huge part of the solution to the growing crisis over care of the elderly?

We interview Chris Millington MD of Doro to find out more.

PATIENTTALK.ORG How has the NHS changed since Nye Bevan in terms of operations, objectives and outcomes?

MILLINGTON Well obviously Nye Bevan were given the task of creating a national health service or a

Doro – Telemedicine

free to use health service so in the early days it was created from gathering together all of the elements that were out there in the private sector. It’s a very different organization now, in fact that’s the most important thing. It is an organization now, it wasn’t then. So it has an operation and it has a very difficult task of trying to provide the best outcomes possible for the nation as a whole and we spend 6% of our GDP and rising dramatically on the cost of providing some immense health care.

PATIENTTALK.ORG Is it not outmoded in the new era of both management style and medical technology?

MILLINGTON I think that it will always lag behind the amazing things that happen within technology and also treatments. You think of all the amazing things that have happened to treat things like cancer and the technology that leaps forwards, the NHS has got to provide the services that links those things together so it is always going to be a challenge. To say it is completely outmoded in this era I think is too challenging to the health service and it provides great support. It just needs to engage further with technology.

PATIENTTALK.ORG What are the main reasons for the failure of the NHS in your view?

MILLINGTON The NHS is always going to creak at the seams because of the demands that are placed upon it and the fact that we all know that we are going to have to pay for this health service, this ever increasing health service. To say it’s failed is probably a bit premature, it potentially could if it doesn’t change, if it doesn’t adapt to the future requirements and one of the things that we are looking at in our research is how people feel about these areas, so we know that people are concerned that potentially there might not be an NHS or that there might not be services when they retire and come to need them. And that’s simply because the aging population is expanding at a massive rate and as it does and it becomes 20%, well it is 20% of our population today but it will head towards 30% within 15 – 20 years and that’s a fairly serious number of users that will rely on the NHS to treat their everyday conditions.

PATIENTTALK.ORG So what should replace the NHS and how should it be funded?

MILLINGTON I would rather focus on how we help the NHS to perform better through the use of technology. I think that the politicians need to look at funding levels and things like that rather than an organisation or a person like myself, the most important thing is how we get more out of the current provision of health care in this country and technology can really change the dynamics of the business model that is there today. If 70% of our GP appointments of people over the age of 65 managing everyday conditions like diabetes, technology can remove the vast majority of those everyday appointments by gathering the information and reporting it automatically to GP’s to be able to act upon any changes rather than just simply turning up and delivering their results and doing yet another blood test and then going away having wasted another hour of their time and potentially an hour the GP’s time, so you can really target resources much better by making technology work to identify real issues and therefore free up the time and resource to help the GP’s to do a different job.

PATIENTTALK.ORG Is the strangle hold of GP’s over the NHS the main problem?

MILLINGTON So again I think my previous point is that you can free up the time of the GP’s. I think that if you ask the GP they’d feel like they were being strangled by the immense pressure they are put under to cope with the number of patients that they are seeing every single day. Again technology can play an immense role in freeing up their time to enable them to make better diagnosis and help people that are in need of that help rather than simply just take results and pass them on in a recording process, an administration process.

PATIENTTALK.ORG How exactly can telemedicine improve health care?

MILLINGTON We can talk about telemedicine or mobile health but effectively what you’re doing is using everyday technology so you can use a mobile phone or a tablet to gather information, to report statistics, to healthcare systems, so a computer can quite easily handle a lot of the data and provide the GP the information to better than act upon the changes and ultimately what you’re looking for are changes in people’s health and wellbeing and therefore you can intervene on whether they need to be admitted to a hospital or whether they need some care or some medication. If you wait until that point where there at a GP, it’s already too late, they’re already in need of that medication or healthcare so if you can reduce the number of visits by taking the readings and measurements through technology that makes a massive difference.

PATIENTTALK.ORG – With the end of the current NHS, how will healthcare improve in the UK?
MILLINGTON I don’t think the NHS is going to end, I think the NHS will adapt and evolve and as a nation we’re going to demand that it does that anyway. Technology needs to make a more relevant role within making sure the NHS is targeted at what we need as a nation and I think it will, it needs the energy and effort of politicians and the health care service themselves to want to do this, to recognise that there are more and more people over the age of 65 that need treatment and we have to find a way to resource those treatments and technology is the only way for us to save money and provide those resources and treatments in the future.

PATIENTTALK.ORG Where can people go for more information?

MILLINGTON If you want to know more about our products and services that we offer visit then you can visit dora.com or of course find us on the usual social media sites.

Leave a comment Posted on September 30, 2015September 30, 2015 Children's health

A new way of detecting serious illness in children up for an award.

Academy of Fab NHS Stuff

Dr Damian Roland, Consultant in Paediatric Emergency Medicine for Leicester’s Hospitals, has been nominated as a potential overall Academy Winner for 2015 by the Academy of Fab NHS Stuff.

On 26 November, Roland will find out if he has been announced as the overall winner in a celebration of ‘Fabness’ hosted by health writer and commentator, Roy Lilley in London.

Dr Roland is a previous winner of an Academy of Fab NHS Stuff award for his work creating ‘POPS’ (Paediatric Observation Priority Score); a scoring system used in the Paediatric Emergency Department which helps to improve detection of serious illness and aid in safe discharge for acutely ill children.

In conjunction with Dr Ffion Davies, clinical lead for the Paediatric Emergency Department at Leicester’s Hospitals, Dr Roland came up with the idea from scratch in 2008 when, as a trainee, he discovered that there were problems in communication when quantifying how sick the children were he was treating. This led to research into his project which has really developed over the last 3 to 4 years and is used across Leicester’s Hospitals. It has now been expanded to NHS Hospitals in Derby, Mansfield, Bristol, Gloucester and Reading.

Dr Roland explains: “I originally submitted POPS to the academy initially as a way to spread the word as I have the copyright but there is no licencing fee for it. I would like to see the system rolled out around the country and am extremely proud to see it being used by other NHS trusts.”

Social media has played a big role in promoting Dr Roland’s projects, having had his idea for POPS retweeted on Twitter over 100 times, and he has since developed an app on which the POPS system can be used. He is also one of the core team for NHS Change Day, which uses social media to share thousands of pledges of action.

More important for Dr Roland than winning the overall Academy winner title, will be meeting like-minded individuals at the Fab NHS Stuff event in London to exchange ideas. Commenting on the event in London, Dr Roland said: “I want it to draw a good analogy between the concept of NHS Change Day and the Academy in that it provides a great opportunity for similar people to share good ideas as it is a repository for good ideas.”

Sarah Remington, of IBM, has worked alongside Damian on POPS and said: “IBM, through our partnership with the Trust, worked with Dr Damian Roland on his work to develop POPS, providing an analytical capability to prove that the scores being recorded were an accurate representation of the patient’s outcome. This was a great opportunity to demonstrate the benefits of combining IBM’s experience in data and analytics with the Trust’s leading edge clinical thinking and one that we are developing as the critical mass of data continues to grow.”

Leave a comment Posted on September 24, 2015September 22, 2015 Social media

Telemedicine – does it actually work? Have your say at our discussion blog!

As many of you know I’m very interested in the whole area of using technology to improve the quality healthcare. We have covered many different varieties of social media over the last couple of years. You can see a few topics here.

Telemedicine Image courtesy of imagerymajestic at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

In the last few months the subject of telemedicine has reared its head. Whether ugly or not remains to be seen. Telemedicine being defined as “is the use of telecommunication and information technologies in order to provide clinical health care at a distance. It helps eliminate distance barriers and can improve access to medical services that would often not be consistently available in distant rural communities” according to our friends at Wikipedia.

So I was very interested in a report from the UK government which has just come out. The report is entitled “Evaluation of the Telephone Support Psychological Wellbeing and Work Feasibility Pilot”. You can read a summary here. Though I have to say it is one of the worst written documents I have ever cast my eyes over. Which bureaucrats can’t write comprehensible English beats me.

Anyhow the evaluation of the ‘Telephone Support’ intervention which hopes to improve employment and health prospects for people with mental health conditions was on the main pretty positive and further trials are recommended.

So what do you think?

It would be great if you would consider using the comments sections below.

You might want to consider the following questions:-

a) Have you ever used Telemedicine? If so for what reason?
b) How effective was it?
c) Would you recommended it to others?
d) If you have not tried it would you consider doing so?
e) Is telemedicine privatization by the back door?
f) Overall what is your view of telemedicine?

Many thanks in advance

Leave a comment Posted on September 2, 2015July 9, 2017 Autism

ABC, Talk with Me! An new app to help with the education of children with autism. Download for free here.

App for autism

A couple of days ago I was contacted by a Ukrainian project called ABC, Talk with Me who have developed a new mobile app which could be of great interest to the autism community. Apart from being the father of a child with autism I also had a grandmother who lived for a few years in Kiev (where the company is based. I’m also a major fan of social media as a way of supporting the autism community.

They asked if I could help them put the word out so given my family circumstances I agreed.

Now I’ve not used the app so I’d be very grateful if you do decide to download it you would use the comments box below to share your thoughts about it. I will then share back with ABC Talk with Me.

You can download the app here.

As some background to the app ABC, Talk with Me have shared “Each year, the number of autistic children increases by 10-13%. Therefore today it is critical to enhance social adaptation of autistic children. Overcoming language barriers of children with special needs is one of the top priorities. For these children to gain language skills, a hard work of parents and teachers is required. Giving a kid an opportunity to express his or her emotions and desires means a better adaptation of this kid in society and in the family.

The new program ABC, Talk with Me! – is state-of-the-art level of education of children with special needs. Its main element and integral component is augmented reality, which has a direct impact on the imagination. The program also improves one’s memory and attention, as well as motor nerves and language skills (reading, perception of pronounced words and speaking) through the study of foreign languages.
We have accumulated and analysed a large enough bulk of information on the characteristics of children with autism and the Asperger syndrome in order to make sure that our program fully meets the needs of young users. First of all, it was necessary to use the visual aspect, because the image effectively promotes one’s imagination. As they say – seeing is believing!

Using a mobile app for the ASD community

Secondly, in addition to entertaining elements, the program should definitely contain educational blocks as well. Thus, a new knowledge is acquired by playing a game that promotes a better perception of this new knowledge.

For example, if one’s tablet or phone is aimed at the alphabet block with some letter of the alphabet, our new application will turn this letter into a picture with animation. For children who have successfully reached the next game level, the new task is to make words out of blocks with letters. At this stage, a cartoon animation appears in front of them. Putting together such letters as D, O and G results in appearance of a nice doggy at the tablet or phone screen. A child can improve his or her pronunciation by repeating the narrator’s words.

The project founders believe that together we can make the lives of other people more interesting and easy. If you don’t stay indifferent to these problems, you can contribute to making these big differences!”