Making an Impact

I love that.

And I think your your passion for the cause just I mean, it obviously oozes out of you.

But the fact that you you've been in an institution, you know, love it or hate it.

I personally love the NHS.

You know, I know it can have its moments of being hard to make change.

And I think that, you know, I'm sure that you've seen so many things change in your career.

What are the biggest things that you have taken from that career into building your company? So

I recognise that there's such a demand for staff to want to give the best care they can.

But workforces are terribly stretched and overwhelmed.

The gaps we're going to have in our workforce, there's going to be 20 million workforce gaps by 2030 in our health and social care.

Staff are burned out, overstretched.

not always given the tools that they need and it's causing to sickness and impacting care ultimately and so I can really see that actually despite advances in best practice unfortunately some things have the trend has been going the wrong way we've had increasing health inequalities shortening lifespan so the population I work with have a life expectancy of 45 years old.

And they are frequently attending emergency services, having severe health problems that isn't being addressed.

So staff recognise this need, but aren't given the resources and they're really under pressure.

And so that was much of the driver is how can I help the workforce? How can I sustain staff? in their wellbeing and how can I take an approach that is going to benefit everybody and ultimately to better care, but also improve our workforce and then also help the organisations because it's going to affect absenteeism and staff turnover and mental health and wellbeing.

And so I think all of that comes together in the solution that we have to have evidence-based, bite-size expert-led content the latest tools and immersive XR learning so people can be thrown into those challenging situations that often cause burnout and people to have incidents and risk.

And they can learn in the safety of a virtual environment before being thrown into those challenging situations.

So it's really that kind of on the coalface clinical experience, the decades of experience of understanding what the needs are for patients and staff that I've taken into the solutions that, that we offer.

So at what point did you make the decision that building this needed to be done outside of the NHS versus, I don't know, getting some sign off approval, some kind of project internally?

Well, unfortunately, yeah, I think when organisations are under pressure and in survival mode, they're not always able to move at pace, see opportunity, have innovative thinking and see what's in front of them.

So I would say that I did propose that, that we would develop tools and resources to spread the best practice within my organisation or to find ways to... to make sure that we're getting the knowledge out there.

But I think that actually the primary task for the NHS is delivering the clinical services and that that's what they saw as their primary task and focus.

And so I wanted to make sure that we're both delivering great services, but also we're not limiting and we're democratising that knowledge.

And it's not only in my clinical research.

services that had access to best practice but we can make sure that's more widely um widely available and i think there is more appetite now in the nhs and other statutory settings to bring innovation with kind of the nhs accelerators and others um but i wasn't so familiar or aware of those and i think i was responsible for kind of doing a good clinical job first and foremost and then actually um It was kind of on the side.