Small steps
Our health and care systems are under strain: a growing and ageing population, combined with budget restraints and pressure on resources are all contributing to a situation where services are stretched and staff feel under stress.
However, leading healthcare practitioners are also acutely aware that new technology has the potential to help relieve many of these pressures, while also supporting staff and helping them achieve better outcomes for patients.
In our Healthier Working Lives programme, we have been seeking out the digital entrepreneurs striving to improve this situation.
We’ve been understanding the innovations out there. Those that shift the needle and disrupt the status quo. And the challenges people face trying to introduce them into the system.
Working with entrepreneurs will undoubtedly help to evolve the healthcare culture but everyone needs to recognise it’s a journey, and not going to happen overnight.
We have to be patient – because big changes often take time – but equally we should be challenging norms and over-turning established outmoded practices.
Opening the door, inch by inch
For many entrepreneurs there are significant barriers to entry so they have to be exceptionally determined to get into the healthcare system and deliver demonstrably new solutions.
The big challenges are:
- Navigation – finding out who to approach with the innovation
- Awareness – ensuring people on the front line know, like and advocate the solution
- Adoption – helping people to use the solution once they are aware of it
Successful entrepreneurs examine the needs of those working in the healthcare sector, and identify quick wins to streamline technology, are the first steps towards systemic change nic making it easier to use and more accessible at scale.
The good news
Naturally, often the most effective ideas emerge from front-line staff who have direct experience of the pressures in the system – symptomatic of an intrapreneurial culture. And it’s up to innovative entrepreneurs to enable those ideas to be realised.
Overall, the care sector should have a very positive outlook for the future because we’ve established that there is:
- a full tank of talent in the supply chain, pushing the doors ajar
- a willingness amongst care sector leaders to unleash the intrapreneurship of their teams
- a wave of new employees set to enter the sector brimming with powerful energy and ideas to drive change
- a maturing of the investment community who recognise the sheer size, scale and value of the care market
System change frequently holds back big strides forward, so the engagement of policy makers and public and private sector investors will be vital to open the doors and capitalise on the talent in the sector.
There’s a raft of evidence of the emerging importance of the health-tech and care-tech from the work of NICA (National Innovation Centre for Ageing); data gathered by market analyst Beauhurst; and insight into the economic impact of older entrepreneurs from Enterprise Nation’s most recent Small Business Barometer that found that the average age of the UK’s business founders was 46, and that 35% of businesses are started and run by people over 50. Proof that age is no barrier to entrepreneurship, and is a viable option for older people looking to boost the economy.