‘Hospital hotels’ for step-down care

Dr John Sandham, CEO of healthcare technology management specialist, TBS GB, which manages technology in over 100 hospitals (and who chairs the annual EBME Seminar), reflects on the potential for wireless technology such as Bluetooth and Wi-Fi to facilitate increasing use of step-down care – as advocated by Lord Carter and his team in their recent review – including via the construction and use in the UK of a new generation of ‘hospital hotels’.

In the keynote speech at last October’s Healthcare Estates 2015 conference (HEJ – January 2016), Lord Carter said he believed one of the challenges for the NHS was ‘How do we develop step-down care?’ “In many other hospitals around the world,” he told delegates, “hospitals focus on the really acute. That is what they are good at; that first 72 hours. Equally,” he continued, “how do we find partners? I know some hospitals are already developing step-down care facilities where they are moving patients from a high cost environment to a low cost one, so, if your hospital is looking at the pathways to discharge, probably in the next two years it will be this that is going to have the most material effect on hospitals in England; that is my view, having talked to many of them.”

Senior politicians and NHS executives accept that healthcare technology can assist with transformational improvements for the NHS. The improvements will deliver higher productivity, safer care, and substantial cost savings. To enable technology to deliver transformational changes, however, requires the government to not only inject capital, but also to have an approach that is inclusive of NHS stakeholders (clinicians, nurses, scientists, engineers, and managers etc.). These stakeholders hold the knowledge required to jointly deliver a transformational technological solution, but unfortunately, although there is momentum, we must ensure that the processes and policies that guide the transformation are properly thought through.