Annual General Meeting 2019

Annual General Meeting 2019

The Jewish Medical Association UK’s Annual General Meeting took place on 10th July 2019. The Guest Speaker was Matthew Gould, CEO for NHSx, a new UK body set up to ensure that staff and patients have the technology they need.  His address was entitled “NHSx – what we’re trying to do, why we’re trying to do it, and what we can learn from Israel”.

After his talk a leading member of the Association, Dr Charlotte Benjamin proposed a vote of thanks.

She summarised Matthew’s address, saying that in his whistlestop tour of NHSx Matthew had described his five point plan, which has evolved from a tour across the UK viewing first hand an array of different IT systems in the NHS. This aimed to (1) Relieve the burden on clinicians, so they can focus on patients; (2) Put services & technology into the hands of citizens; (3)Ensuring that clinical information can be safely accessed anywhere in the system; (4)Improve patient safety across the NHS; and (5)Improve productivity with digital technology.

She said that Matthew had highlighted the current difficulties that he had observed as a result of his personal experience of a family member carrying around their medical notes in a suitcase to ensure that all clinicians in the system would have all their relevant details. However, he shared that there are also some pockets of good practice.

Thus his aim is keep NHSx a small organisation setting standards and driving improvements across the health and social care systems. To do this, he was drawing on his inspirations from his time and experience of medical systems in Israel, namely in Clalit and Maccabi, where there is system interoperability and accessible data to support population health management.

On behalf of the Association she said that we applaud him for this work and look forward to being the recipients of this key enabler on behalf of all UK patients and citizens.