I wanted to follow on from what Christoph Thuemmler said. We must be cognisant of what is going on elsewhere. Apple now has a complete med tech division and is promising such innovations as glucose sensors on its watches. There are commercial developments that patients want to access, and they will push us hard. Justine Ewing mentions Push Doctor in her submission. With Push Doctor on your phone, for £20 you can get a face-to-face consultation with a qualified GP and a prescription if you need it. I read every weekend about the locum problems all over Scotland and the millions of pounds that are being spent on locums, and I wonder why we cannot take some subscription to Push Doctor for patients through NHS 24. That would probably get rid of many of the actual go-and-see patient problems.
Those are commercial developments, and I know that it is a bit taboo to be considering them. We are rightly proud of our NHS, but we must look at areas where companies have developed the right solution rather than do it from scratch. That is true for much of the home monitoring, which is another area that we will come on to.
The other thing that we are falling behind with on that side is our innovation pipeline. We are not funding devices and med tech development in Scotland as we should be. I work with people around the world—in Hong Kong, Singapore and the United States—who are building up large wealth packages because they are developing companies and research projects together. We really have fallen behind.
11:45
Going back to Alex Cole-Hamilton’s question about decision making, if a company has a very large piece of equipment such as a surgical robot, it can apply to the health boards. It would need very good cost-saving arguments, but big companies perhaps can do that. It may be worth talking to companies such as Medtronic about that.
With small and medium-sized enterprises and more day-to-day stuff, it depends on whether they have clinical opinion leaders and whether they can push through clinical barriers—people’s natural resistance to changing their way of working. Imagine that a big organisation is trying to roll out a piece of human resources software. In the NHS, everyone gets to try the software and say, “I don’t like it. I’m not using it in my job.” We might have a complex clinical management need, but everyone is empowered to say yea or nay to new pieces of technology, so things become difficult. That is a natural human reaction—I understand that push-back.