Our first Health Tech Challenge event

We brought together 40+ nursing and tech leaders at IBM’s offices near Waterloo – the challenge – identifying smarter ways of working for nurses. There was an incredible cast of speakers to get ideas flowing. We opened with England’s CNIO, Helen Balsdon, in conversation with industry leader, NHS NED and former nurse Caroline Stanger. Linda Havard the CNIO from NHS University Hospitals Liverpool Group joined IBM’s Sara Lilywhite and Brendan Buckingham for a Q&A about AI and François Josserand from IBM described their Client Engineering programme which puts design thinking to work to solve real world problems.

People, people, people

The room was buzzing with conversation. A strong theme that emerged from the day?: people, people, people.

• It’s the connections between people that makes things happen
• Tech is there to support people, not for its own sake
• Tech that is co-designed with the people that will use it is just better

We heard that nurses are uniquely placed to bring that person-centred perspective to tech. They don’t need to be the tech expert in the room, what they bring, in addition to their clinical expertise, is a deep human understanding forged through their close working with patients.

Be bold, be optimistic

Audience members were urged to be bold, to take every opportunity that presented itself and to build a strong network to help you get stuff done – something that obviously resonated as it came up time and again in networking over lunch and after the event. 

There was optimism about how artificial intelligence can enhance the day-to-day experiences of nurses and support the delivery of truly person-centred care. And thoughtful debate about how to strike the right balance between innovation and safety. There was a healthy reminder that many of the existing processes we’re aiming to improve with tech may not have been held to such scrutiny in the first place.

Where the magic happens

At Future Nurse we believe that brilliant things happen when you bring people together so we devoted two hours of the day to table based conversations, hosted by our commercial partners and by us: 

• Accurx’s table explored how the burden of documentation can be eased, and brought their expertise in ambient voice technology
• Alcidion focused on the challenge of getting the right information, at the right time, to the right person
• Feebris’s conversation explored the role of technology in the shift from hospital to community
• IBM delved into the problems that could be addressed through technology to release time to care
• Future Nurse held a discussion on how we put nurses at the heart of driving digital transformation.

Becky Ashworth, Future Nurse podcast host extraordinaire, facilitated the table for Future Nurse and included this brilliant summary in her LinkedIn post about our event: 

“One takeaway that really stuck with me: ✨every nurse, at any stage of their career, has something valuable to contribute to digital transformation ✨ Our expertise isn’t about coding or tech jargon, it’s the deep, human understanding that comes from time spent with patients.”

Everyone loves a survey…

Throughout the day we asked the audience about their experiences of tech at work, this is what they told us….

Around 70% of our audience felt that nurses were ‘very’ or ‘somewhat’ involved in decision making around tech in their organisation, but ten people told us they were rarely involved or not involved at all, so we still have a long way to go.

And when we asked the audience for one word they associated with health tech, the top answer was a disappointing ‘clunky’.

Perhaps not a huge surprise given the problems highlighted by the Queens Institute of Community Nursing.

And the biggest barrier to nurses’ effective use of tech? Time and training.

When we asked our audience about nurses’ budgetary freedom for tech purchasing and we weren’t surprised that, for most audience members, this was limited. One of the biggest concerns we hear is that nurses either don’t have the budgets they need for tech, or that they are unable to use those budgets to purchase what they need.

However, there is room for cautious optimism. A slim majority of the audience told us that tech had helped them to provide great care. 

All too soon the day was done

And did I even mention Spot the (Boston Dynamics robot) Dog joined us for lunch and won the crowd over with its adorable head tilts?

Following reflections from Linda Havard and two of Future Nurse’s Advisory Board members, Mateen Jiwani and Freda Donkor, IBM’s Caroline Stanger brought the event to a close and we continued the conversations on the sun terrace of IBM’s Innovation Studio.

Huge thanks to everyone who joined us at the event, to IBM for their wonderful hosting, and our partners Alcidion, AccuRx and Feebris who made this event possible.