Matthew Gould, NHSX’s Chief Executive, has officially addressed the organisation’s integration with the Transformation Directorate at NHS England (NHSE).
It was originally revealed that NHSX, which develops NHS best practice for technology, digital and data, would be merged into NHSE last November, with HTN then gathering an ‘industry view’ collection of reactions from health tech experts.
Now Gould has discussed, and elaborated on, the news in his latest blog post, which reflects on NHSX’s achievements and also looks forward to future plans.
“Our mission will remain – to drive the digital transformation of the NHS and social care. And our status as a joint unit of NHS England and DHSC [the Department of Health and Social Care] continues as well,” begins the blog, before Gould goes on to say, “There is still a huge job to do. My team aren’t going anywhere – we will be pressing on with our work, as part of NHS England’s Transformation Directorate, and as part of DHSC.”
Looking back over the last three years and his team’s achievements, Gould highlights: putting ‘digital at the heart of the future plans’; the publication of the ‘What Good Looks Like’ and ‘Who Pays for What’ guidance; helping to secure a spending settlement of £2.1 billion to ‘help drive the digital transformation of health and care’; helping trusts to raise their digital maturity and supporting almost 60 NHS trusts through the Digital Aspirant programme; collaborating on the NHS Datastore; getting Shared Care Records into the majority of Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) and helping them to start using population health analytics; supporting virtual wards and more care at home; and work on the NHS AI Lab, as well as the NHS Covid Pass in the NHS App.
Specific milestones delivered by NHSX and partners include:
- Developing the NHS COVID Pass in six weeks
- Scaling remote monitoring with 200,000 patients benefiting so far
- Working with NHS Digital to secure a deal with Microsoft to provide Microsoft 365
- Launching the information governance portal and the assured supplier list for Digital Social Care Records
- Delivering 50 training sessions on digital transformation
- Initiating the COVID-19 chest imaging database, which now contains over 40,000 images from more than 20 trusts
- Ensuring around 99 per cent of GP practices are ‘now able to conduct video consultations’ – a leap from under 10 per cent in February 2020
- Responding to a frontline shortage of laptops by finding and deploying 40,000 laptops in weeks
- Distributing 11,000 iPads to 9,000 care homes in England
- Alerting over 400 health and care providers to 23 critical cyber vulnerabilities and supporting them with fixes – plus much more.
Focusing on the future, Gould writes, “we now have an opportunity to transform how the 24m [million] people now registered with the NHS App interact with the NHS…my team is my proudest achievement of all. Diverse, committed, skilled, they have together built NHSX into an open, unhierarchical, creative and supportive environment. We will be proudly taking that culture, and our mission, into our new home.”
To read the blog post by Matthew Gould, please visit the NHSX website here.
