UK Health Secretary WES Streeting says the use of robotics is at the heart of the government’s 10-year plan and willingness to increase productivity for the NHS.
Robot-assisted surgery has become the standard for certain procedures such as ear, nose and throat manipulation, and hospitals that fail to use this technology are paid less.
“What excites me most about what the NHS is,” Streeting said, including the expansion of “pioneering robotics.”
“We want to make sure we are using more robotic surgeries, so we want to ensure that eight surgeries will be performed by robots in 10 years,” he said. Currently, one in 60 elective surgery is robot-assisted.
Officials said the expansion of robotics is expected in general surgical procedures, urology, gynecology, trauma, orthopedics, as well as cardiothoracic, ear, nose and throat procedures.
The use of robotic surgery not only increases the number of treatments, but also speeds up recovery time as it is less invasive and patients spend time in overgrown hospitals.
The 10-year plan will set up proposals to expand the use of robotics at NHS pharmacies to distribute prescriptions, and accelerate the use of robotic process automation to process data entry and medical stocks.
Streeting said the plan would increase the number of “best practice tariffs” from next year, under which hospitals will be financially punished for sticking to outdated surgical practices.
“So you’re closing the space where you can just get behind and throw away taxpayer money,” Streeting said.
“We recognize that it takes time and money, but over time it’s not acceptable that some hospitals provide better care with better value, while others provide lower care with worse value.”
Wes Street at Moore Fields Eye Hospital in March 2024 © Charlie Bibby/ft
Ministers whose kidney cancer has been treated in part by robots said the increased productivity and efficiency that can be achieved using such technology is essential to prove that the NHS can remain a viable public service.
The public funding model was free at the time of use and was “real risk,” he said. “If we don’t make the NHS sustainable, we’ll be bust.”
Referring to the importance of a 10-year plan to fix the “broken” NHS, he said “everyone knows how existential this is.”
Improving the performance of the NHS is one of the important ways to expect the government to take responsibility for the public in the upcoming elections.
The Streeting Management Labour Party is currently voting behind the reforms of Nigel Farage UK.
Health leaders are questioning whether all NHS hospitals can increase the use of robotics.
Matthew Taylor, CEO of the NHS Coalition and former Labour strategist, said:
“If hospital trusts that have not yet invested in this advanced technology are not allocated the capital funds needed to purchase, they risk falling behind in breaking into selective waiting lists while also costing less for the work they do.”
Health leaders question whether it is possible for all NHS hospitals to increase the use of robotics © Charlie Bibby/ft
Like robots, the 10-year plan proposes more use of Ambient Voice Technology (AVT). This is an AI-powered product aimed at making doctors more quickly to obtain medical notes, automatically generate patient visits, highlight relevant details, and create clinical summary.
According to Streeting, the technology alone could increase physician productivity by up to 20%.
However, the rise in high-tech support medical notes has raised concerns about the risks of AI-generated manufacturing known as “hapticism” and the issues of data privacy for patients.
This month, the NHS National Chief Clinical Information Officer wrote to staff to warn that many AVT systems “widely used” in clinical practice that do not comply with NHS governance standards are “widely used.”
“We need to ensure that there is widespread awareness among (and) clinicians who are using approved, trialed, tested products and software,” Streeting said. “I take this security issue really seriously and take data security for people very seriously.
“What’s not legal is to use software or products that are licensed and not authorized to use. Therefore, an NHS reader will send that message to the forefront through the system.”
He said he knows that NHS staff “will give the job a tool because they have a government that shares their appetite for using ambient AI.”
Streeting said the 10-year plan will be followed by a series of further announcements, including a new fall workforce plan.
“It was written before ChatGpt was widely used and it was already out of date, so we abandoned the previous government’s workforce plans,” he said.
Instead of asking, “How many staff do we need to maintain our current model of care over the next 10 years?”, he said, “With our reform plan, what kind of workforce is needed, what should we do, where should we deploy, what skills do we need?”
