Cross Talk’s daughter says: “Daddy, I want to be an NHS IT consultant…”

Boffins are back in public favour, thanks to television programmes that celebrate innovation. Let’s hope IT - and NHS IT in particular - can ride the wave, says Mike Cross.

After years of aspiring to be a ballet dancer, my daughter now has a new goal in life. “I want to be an inventor,” she announced, walking to school the other morning.

I don't think I've been so chuffed since she nominated “Here Comes the Sun” as her favourite Beatles song. Not because her new career choice might support me in my old age - I've known lots of inventors, but few who got rich - but because her interest is a sure-fire sign that inventing is now trendy.

For the return of innovators as popular heroes, I think we have to give credit to the TV programme Dragon's Den (or possibly Doctor Who). It is very good news for the NHS, which is showing signs of shrugging off a cultural reluctance to celebrate innovation. 

IT-enabled dragons

One sign of the changing times was a big spread in a tabloid newspaper celebrating the talents of Britain's NHS inventors in coming up with everything from a cheap and simple hook for infusion bottles to a system of coloured paper hearts, stuck on a ward wall, to show recovering surgery patients how far they should walk every day.

The article was all the more remarkable because the newspaper in question is well known for castigating the NHS for expending resources on anything that the man in the saloon bar would not immediately recognise as direct patient care.

So, I'm delighted that tabloid editors as well as eight-year-olds now seem to recognise that innovation is a laudable practice. There’s a gap in popular appreciation, however. On Dragon's Den, a high proportion of the bright ideas involve IT. Readers of this column won't need to be reminded why.

In the NHS, though, the public face of innovation is largely an IT-free zone. (OK, the paper hearts are a form of information technology, but a pre-computer one.)

I don't mean that innovation isn't happening in the NHS - this year's BT e-Health Insider Awards attracted twice as many entries as last year’s. Yet, I suspect people are a little chary of celebrating it outside the safe community of colleagues who “get it”.

You can understand why. Given the enduringly dismal popular image of public sector IT, which is somewhere between incompetence and malevolent big brotherism, IT-based NHS innovation isn’t exactly a road to popularity. And colleagues inside the NHS can be just as cynical and dismissive as the proverbial man or woman on the Clapham Bendybus.

Oxygen, scalpel, PDA…

Changing this popular perception is difficult, and fraught with peril. Industry awards are a great start and deserve all the encouragement they can get.

However, the boost to morale of being told you are a brilliant world-beater on one day a year hardly makes up for 364 days of cynicism and dismissal. And it’s fair to say that even the highest profile IT industry award attracts little notice outside the immediate community (though it can be jolly handy for persuading a chief executive that you might be worth listening to).

What’s needed is a change in the popular image of IT innovation in health. Possibly, the current wave of emerging technology might achieve that by itself – no one who thinks for five minutes about the future of healthcare can fail to get excited by current developments in mobile technology and point-of-care data collection, to name just two.

But I think we may need a bit more of a leg-up. This could perhaps be a new TV series along the lines of Dragon’s Den, or even a plotline in Casualty featuring an IT enthusiast as a life-saving pioneer rather than a nerdy management lackey.

I’m sure the ideas are out there. I’ll be persuaded that they’re working when my daughter announces “I want to be an NHS computer person” – even though that’s even less likely to put her in the position of being able to support me in my dotage.