The Challenge of Innovative Product Adoption in Health & Social Care

The Challenge of Innovative Product Adoption in Health & Social Care

In March 2015 the NHS called for innovators to develop new technologies and digital services to improve care for patients and save money for taxpayers. NHS England chief executive, Simon Stevens said the ambition of the NHS is to become the best place in the world to test innovations that produce benefits for patients and taxpayers. “We’ll never be the system that pays the highest prices, but we could be the health service most open to new and better ways of providing care,” he said.

All of which seems to be good news for innovative companies such as Phil-e-Slide who constantly develop their products to improve patient care, increase patient and carer safety whilst reducing taxpayer costs through the multifunctional properties of its products.

It remains to be seen however, whether the innovation programme does fast-track the introduction and use of new products into hospitals, care homes, hospices, community health and social care teams or whether wide-spread adoption of new technologies continues to be difficult.

In an article on 7 barriers to effective risk management, the points made by author, Mike Webster’s could be just as easily be applied to the barriers of change in health and social care – and in our opinion, gives an indication of why it takes so long to justify to those responsible for ordering and budgets that changes are needed. Webster’s barriers included, “Too great a degree of tolerance of poor standards and of risk”, where organisations have too much tolerance of poor standards and of risk and/or be dominated by a culture of “that’s the way we do things round here”. He continued saying, “In these organisations, it is unlikely anyone will be challenged for risky behaviour or asked ‘is there a better way we can do this?’”.

Social media discussions we had following our blog on Subconscious and Behavioural Drift agree that tolerance of poor standards and risk exists as we subconsciously all suffer from behavioural drift, especially when learning new procedures. The reason why is summed up nicely by Joshua C Klapow and Sheri D Pruitt:

We interact with an environment that is constantly changing. Second, you are basically taking old behaviours and replacing them with new ones. The key word here is “new”. The behaviours are not yet learned habits, and you will have a tendency to slip back into your old patterns. 

Having seen the challenges of introducing change throughout his own care industry career, Phil Strong determined that innovative products such as Biotechsis® are more likely to be adopted when they are intuitive so that they are used the right way, every time (consistently) to avoid people slipping back into their old behaviour patterns.

To discuss how the intuitive technology within the Biotechsis® inbed care system range can help your organisation improve care for patients whilst minimising budget spend, please call 01454 417961 or email info@phil-e-slide-uk.com.

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