The great and the good convened at 1 Plough Place this morning – home of the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts – for the launch of a new report on how the NHS can save a whopping £20 billion (and to hear what Andrew Lansley had to say about the whole thing on behalf of the Conservatives). I’m inclined to agree with NESTA’s proposition that: “It is possible to develop cheaper, more effective patient-centred services and approaches to public behaviour change but only by adopting radical new ways of innovating within the NHS”. There’s been a prevailing shift towards consumerism in healthcare which signals opportunities to make efficiency savings while improving patient satisfaction through better online self-service systems, as well as kiosks and the like. Is this going to be the holy grail that we’ve all been looking for?

Well maybe, to the extent that we’re going to need to exploit the potential of consumerism and patient empowerment if we’re going to defuse the demographic time bomb and move towards a preventative model of healthcare that involves people in their own health and wellbeing. But this raises some interesting questions about whether the NHS is really ready to move away from its traditional top-down approach and to what extent it is willing and able to partner with the private sector and exploit the possibilities being opened up by the internet and the rise of consumer goods like Nintendo’s Wii-fit and DS My Health Coach games. Check out my article on ‘Democratising healthcare’ in our third edition of IQ, Intellect’s new glossy magazine.

Tags: Consumerism, Healthcare, IQ, NESTA, NHS

This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 4th, 2009 at 7:23 pm and is filed under Transformational Government. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.