What CW Innovation is
CW Innovation, in its most basic terms, is a programme that takes really good ideas or new technologies that we think could improve the way we look after patients in our hospitals and in other hospitals or in our community.
It refines them, brings them in, brings a community of doctors, operational managers and nurses around them to test, refine, evaluate, and see if these ideas are as good as we think they are.
That’s the safest and most effective way of bringing new technologies and new ways of working to bear in an environment like this, in an acute hospital.
Bridging ideas and healthcare
We’ve got an amazingly vibrant, entrepreneurial scene in healthcare. Lots of new ideas coming through all the time, incredible advances in technology.
But how do you get those things actually into practice? Helping patients, helping communities, helping our staff do an even better job?
That’s the tricky bit.
So we designed CW Innovation as a bridge between those two worlds. Over the last five years, we’ve become hopefully quite effective at that.
Responding to the challenges facing healthcare
It’s pretty well documented, the challenges that healthcare systems across the world have in terms of capacity, in terms of the way we manage conditions, and in terms of the complexity of patients as populations get older.
There’s the complexity that goes around treating somebody who has lots of different conditions and multi-morbidity.
Innovation helps us. It gives us the tools that we need to keep pace with the change.
But also, on the other side of the coin, medical innovation enables us to keep pace with the incredibly rapid advance of technology, particularly around artificial intelligence, robotic process automation and our use of data.
These things can be incredible tools in how we look after people and how we provide care.
Putting people at the centre of innovation
It’s this two-edged sword really.
Innovation is hugely important in terms of putting ourselves in the shoes of the person who needs help, be they here, be they at home, be they wherever.
It’s thinking about how we can come up with new and more effective ways of supporting them.
But also thinking on the other side. With technology blossoming as quickly as it is, how can we capitalise on that, capture those new technologies and apply them in our clinical settings to help more people?
Using technology to improve patient care
Isla Healthcare, for example, is something we’ve used here. It does a number of different things, but one of the things it does is enable patients to take photographs of wounds and other things like that and upload them straight here.
What we used to have to do was make an appointment, have people come in and be seen by a specialist, go home and then come back for another appointment once that image had been reviewed.
Now we fast-track that system through and we’re seeing thousands of patients this way every single month.
It speeds up diagnosis, it improves the experience of patients and it means that you don’t have lots of annoying visits where you’re taking out half a day to come to hospital for a ten-minute appointment to have a photograph taken.
It makes things better for us here at Chelsea and Westminster and in many other organisations that are now using this technology.
After we tested and evaluated it here, it’s helping us to see more people more effectively, get on top of waiting lists and really put the patient at the heart of what we’re trying to do.
Supporting patients through virtual wards
Since 2017, we’ve been working on a huge programme looking at what we call virtual wards.
That means that people who historically might have needed to stay in hospital for observation can now go home and we can digitally and remotely do that monitoring in a very safe way.
That’s a programme that’s growing and growing and growing, and it’s very much become business as usual for how we look after patients in our community.
It’s better for them because no one wants to be in hospital if they don’t need to be there.
But it’s better for us as well because we get to see more patients.
Empowering people to improve healthcare
Around every corner in a building like this, there is somebody who is sitting there looking at a problem and going, ‘I think I know how to fix that.’
That’s the future of CW Innovation.
That’s what we’ve been doing for the last five years, but there’s so much more we can do with the tools that are at our disposal now.
We should be able to do it faster. We should be able to get more people in, bring more people into the innovation fold, skill them up and give them the confidence to do this work themselves.
That’s really the direction that we’re going.
It’s about empowering people to do great things.
And it’s not just about empowering staff. It’s about empowering our patients as well, who want to get involved in this work.
They want to understand how their family will be better cared for.
I think that’s the exciting bit. Bringing the people bit to these technologies and these challenges and really making something of it.
That’s what CW Innovation is there for.
The CW Innovation programme empowers Trust staff to find solutions that mean better outcomes for patients, both in and out of hospital.
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