Derek

The FT reported this morning that the Government are looking at cutting back NHS recruitment in the upcoming workforce plan. This is a good idea. The NHS keeps hiring more and more staff, but delivering much less with their workforce. Our 'Hospital of the future' research papers called for an approach which uses much more automation and shifts more secondary care into the community. Between 2019 and 2023 hospital staff numbers grew significantly - consultants up by 15.8%, junior doctors by 24.6%, nurses up by 19.5% and support staff by 18.5%. In comparison, activity fell or stayed flat. Emergency admissions fell by 4.3%, and non-emergency admissions by 1.4%. Outpatient appointments grew by only 1.8%, and waiting list treatments grew by only 0.8%. We are buying much more capacity, but getting little or nothing to show for it. The pattern is really stark in A&E - between 2010 and 2022 attendances grew by about 24%, but doctor numbers skyrocketed by over 80%. It isn't sustainable to plan for an NHS workforce of up to 2.3 million people by the mid 2030s, employing 9 per cent of all workers in England. All other industries have to adapt and find ways to get productivity benefits over time, the NHS isn't different. AI isn't the whole answer, but it will be part of it. Clinical roles aren't unique in terms of their complexity or the risk considerations, and human clinicians make plenty of errors and mistakes in their work as it is. But language models are consistently improving over time, whereas human clinicians aren't - at some point it's likely that whole bundles of tasks will be outsourceable to machine intelligence, which will be a good thing for patients, medical professionals and taxpayers alike. @restate_thinks 'Hospital of the future' series is linked here, stats above are from the framing paper. re-state.co.uk/publications/…