One of the biggest challenges currently facing the health service is staff burnout.
The media is full of stories about growing workloads, patient backlogs and rising industrial action.
I’ve been a doctor since 1999, and a GP since 2008, and the problems are getting worse rather than better.
During Covid-19 the renewed respect for the profession boosted morale. Who can forget the weekly round of applause our key workers received from people on their doorsteps?
That seems like a long time ago now. Reality has returned with a bang with increasing waiting lists. Workloads have doubled or even trebled and systems still aren’t aligned.
Things have got so bad our NHS nurses staged their first ever national walkout over pay but the frustration is that technology could ease workload pressures and reduce burnout rates.
There’s a quote by President J F Kennedy that I use. He famously said: “The best time to repair the roof is when the sun is shining.” That’s how you need to approach the NHS but the problem is it’s now raining and it’s much harder to implement those changes.
That’s why the technology has such an important part to play.
One obvious – but solvable – problem is the number of disparate systems that doctors have to sign in to just to access patient information.
A lot of manual and mundane tasks could easily be done by technology and free up valuable time and reduce the staff stress levels and burnout rates.
Single sign-on (SSO) solutions can quickly reduce the amount of time clinicians spend logging in to multiple applications.
Trying to memorise multiple passwords in order to sign-on to several systems is frustrating, time-consuming and inefficient. You end up trying to create a mental jigsaw for your patient when it could all be in one place.
Some trusts have already implemented single sign-on solutions but many haven’t and that is a big problem if we want to reduce burnout.