UK health secretary Wes Streeting has said the use of robotics will be at the heart of the government’s 10-year plan for the NHS and the drive to improve productivity.
Robot-assisted surgeries will become standard for certain procedures, such as ear, nose and throat operations, and hospitals that fail to use this technology will be paid less, he told the Financial Times a week before his blueprint for reviving the NHS is published.
“The thing that gives me the most excitement about what the NHS could be is the revolution in medical technology,” including the expansion of “pioneering robotics”, Streeting said.
“We want to make sure we’ve got more use of robotic surgery so that in 10 years’ time, one in eight operations are done by a robot,” he said. Currently, about one in 60 elective surgical procedures are robot assisted.
Officials said the expansion of robotics was expected in general surgery, urology, gynaecology, trauma and orthopaedics, as well as in cardiothoracic, ear, nose and throat procedures.
The use of robotic surgery will not only increase the number of treatments, but will speed up recovery times because it is less invasive, with patients spending less time in overstretched hospitals.
The 10-year plan will also set out proposals to expand the use of robotics in NHS pharmacies to dispense prescriptions, as well as accelerating the use of robotic process automation, which could see robots handling data entry and medical stocks.
Streeting said the plan will increase the number of “best practice tariffs” from next year, under which hospitals will be financially penalised for sticking to outdated surgical practices.
“So you close down the space for the laggards to just hang back and waste taxpayers’ money,” Streeting said.
“We recognise that it takes time and money, but over time it’s just not acceptable that some hospitals will be delivering better care at better value for money, while others are delivering poorer care at worse value.”
Wes Streeting at Moorfields eye hospital in March 2024 © Charlie Bibby/FT
The cabinet minister, whose own kidney cancer was in part treated by a robot, said the increase in productivity and efficiency that could be achieved using such technology would be vital in proving the NHS can remain a viable public service.
The model of a publicly funded, free at the point of use service, was in “real jeopardy”, he said. “If we don’t make the NHS sustainable, it will go bust.”
Referring to the importance of his 10-year plan for fixing the “broken” NHS, he said “everyone knows how existential this is”.
Improving NHS performance is one of the key ways his government expects to be held accountable by the public at the next election.
Streeting’s governing Labour party is currently polling behind Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, which has suggested a shift away from the current tax funded model towards an insurance-based system.
Health leaders have questioned whether it would be possible for all NHS hospitals to increase the use of robotics, given capital funding from the Treasury will remain flat for the next three years.
Matthew Taylor, chief executive of the NHS Confederation and a former Labour party strategist, said: “For NHS organisations to reach a point where they can make significant productivity jumps by using robots they will need upfront central investment in this type of technology, which does not come cheap.
“If those hospital trusts that have not already invested in this advanced technology aren’t allocated the capital funding they need to buy it, they simultaneously risk falling further behind in making inroads into their elective waiting lists while also being paid less for the work they do.”
Health leaders have questioned whether it would be possible for all NHS hospitals to increase the use of robotics © Charlie Bibby/FT
As well as robotics, the 10-year plan will propose greater use of ambient voice technology (AVT) — AI-powered products that aim to make it quicker for doctors to take medical notes, auto-generating transcripts of patient visits, highlighting relevant details and creating clinical summaries.
Streeting said this technology alone can boost productivity among doctors by up to 20 per cent.
However, the rise in tech-assisted medical note-taking has spurred concern about the risk of AI-generated fabrications, known as “hallucinations”, as well as the issue of patient data privacy.
This month the national chief clinical information officer of the NHS wrote to staff to warn that there were a number of AVT systems being “widely used” in clinical practice that do not comply with NHS governance standards.
“We’ve got to make sure that there is a widespread awareness among clinicians of the importance [of] using approved, tried and tested products and software,” Streeting said. “I take this security issue really seriously, and people’s data security seriously.
“What is not legitimate is using software or products that are not licensed and authorised for use. So certainly with NHS leaders we will be cascading that message down through the system through to the front line.”
He said NHS staff should know “they’ve got a government that shares their appetite for using ambient AI and we’re going to give them the tools to the job”.
Streeting said the 10-year plan will be followed by a series of further announcements, including a new workforce plan in the autumn.
“We’ve ditched the previous government’s workforce plan because it was written before ChatGPT became widely used and it’s already out of date,” he said.
“Instead of asking ‘how many staff do we need to maintain our current care model over the next 10 years?’, it will ask ‘given our reform plan, what workforce do we need, what should they do, where should they be deployed and what skills do they need?’”