Healthcare | Read the latest blogs, news and views from Infomentum.

For most of my career, I've worked in and around public services, particularly policing, but also alongside a wide range of partner agencies responsible for supporting citizens through complex and often challenging journeys. Although the services themselves are very different, the questions citizens ask are remarkably consistent:"What's happening?" "What happens next?" "Do I need to do anything?" "Who can help me?"

Today, citizens expect answers to those questions quickly, clearly and through the channels they prefer to use. They increasingly compare their experience of public services not with other public services, but with the best digital experiences they encounter elsewhere in their daily lives. Yet many public sector organisations still struggle to provide timely, proactive communication throughout a citizen's journey.

In the NHS pressure builds in waves. Winter surges. Capacity crises. Workforce shortages. Technology programmes that promised change but delivered more complexity instead, in a very similar way to what we have seen as a team with our work with the Police forces we’ve worked with.

Dr Simon Eccles has spent decades working in A&E, operating at the sharpest edge of the NHS. He has seen the demand for services, people unsure where to obtain the best care, and frustrated patients, whilst watching his colleagues try to do their absolute best. His perspective on digital change in healthcare is shaped by that experience. It is not abstract. It is grounded in what actually helps clinicians do their jobs and what impedes them.

What decades on the frontline reveal about system-generated demand, avoidable work, and where meaningful change really starts.

Dr Simon Eccles has spent decades working in A&E as a senior doctor and serving on countless boards across London. He is also a thought leader on the best technology for the NHS, and he sat down with us to discuss ways the NHS can improve its use of Salesforce. With all his years of experience, he has seen winter pressures come and go, targets change, restructurings repeat, and countless workforce initiatives introduced with good intent. His view is not theoretical. It is lived.