Katya Zubareva:
Well, the main issues at the moment are post COVID recovery. You can imagine. And in some services it's more critical than others. So depending on how long the services were closed for, there could be quite a significant backlog of surgeries that we now need to work our way through as healthcare systems. But that does vary a lot by country. And it does vary a lot by type of services. There is quite a significant staffing problem, both in clinicians and nurses and various dental technicians and such like, exacerbated in the UK by Brexit and just generally post COVID burnout and tiredness in the staff, which needs to be dealt with while also dressing a significant backlog. So you can see how quite a significant issue.
If you think of about the supply issue, the staffing issue and the staffing shortages, and then you think of the exacerbated demand issues and the COVID backlog, you can resolve them in well, usually in parallel, two things working in parallel. Well there are two things in particular that we tend to look at. One, is helping develop the best clinician or staffing proposition, which addresses the needs of the staff and make sure that they're happy and willing to work and kind of contribute to working the way through the backlog. And the other one is redesigning the care delivery itself. And there is some elements of care which obviously need to happen in person. So, if you need surgery, you need surgery, but there are some of them that can be done remotely via video consultation, for example, or your scan being read remotely with a tele radiologist rather than an in person radiologist and things like that. So we spend a lot of time thinking about the clinician proposition or the staff proposition really more broadly.
What do the clinicians actually look for from their corporate, from their employer? Do they want flexibility? Do they want training? Do they want mentorship? But it's quite often less about just paying them more and much more about creating an atmosphere, where they feel part of a community, they feel supported. They actually can see the benefits of being part of a corporate. And actually COVID in a weird way, helped with this because it was a lot easier to work your way through all the, just understanding when do you need to close, what PPE you need to wear, ordering PPE, all of these things that they've had to battle with. It was a lot easier to do when you were part of the corporate supported by the central team, which is spending their time figuring all of this out rather than an independent player where you had to figure all of that out yourself.
So how do you make the clinicians want to be part of the corporate platform is a very significant theme that actually in COVID times, it has become even more important and even more interesting. You can technically move clinicians or nurses across countries, but you also have to figure out the regulations and the rules around who is and isn't allowed to work in a particular country. What do you need to do to requalify if you need to requalify, things like that. Again, a corporate platform can help figure out faster than an independent player might be able to. And on the other side, in terms of the patient proposition and changing the way we deliver care again, we have been spending a lot of time engaging with the patient population themself via surveys or focus groups, and thinking about how do they want their care delivery to change and what the art of the possible is really there.
So how much of it can be done remotely, how much can be done at home and pathology testing, for example is a really interesting question. So some of the blood work, you actually need to have blood drawn, so it's not something you can do at home, but a lot of the other tests, whether it's a finger prick for smaller quantities of blood or urine tests, you can do them at home, or you can collect them at home and then send off to a provider without needing to go into a hospital to get the test done. So that's quite interesting because it frees up the hospital or provide a capacity while also making it a lot more convenient for the patient. Or handheld ultrasounds are actually a thing that exists, is very rarely used, but theoretically, you could have some of the kind of long term condition management testing, follow up done at home by the patient.
