Health and Social Care Robotics Simulation Centre (HSCRSC)

Health and social care in the UK face long-term challenges from an ageing population and improvements in healthcare, and short-term challenges, from COVID-19 and the backlog of patients awaiting treatment.

The NHS is one of the world's largest employers with around 1.4 million full-time equivalent (FTE) staff in England. The wage bill makes up nearly 45% of the total budget. Hospitals, mental health services and community providers are reporting a shortage of nearly 84,000 FTE staff, 38,000 of these are nurses.

Additional funding has been agreed but without a major change in the efficiency of health and social care we will never catch up. "Digital" in all its forms must play a leading role in this change, but the UK, and the NHS in particular, does not have a good track record in implementing technology-based changes. Much of health and social care is, and should continue to be, delivered in person, but there are many activities that could be undertaken safely and much more efficiently by robots.

There are also robots that work **with** humans, helping to perform tasks to a higher standard (Surgical robots are already used to a limited extent in the NHS). However, there are many areas where robots and robotics could play a much larger role and, when appropriate, work unsupervised, for example, portering, stores, cleaning, disinfection, image analysis (X-rays, scans etc).

Simply transferring technology directly from the research laboratory to clinical and social care has a long history of failure. What is needed is an intermediate "proving ground" stage where new robotic technology can be tried and tested by real users (patients, staff etc.) in a realistic environment (hospital and community) but without the pressures and risks of direct introduction into health and social care.

We propose to bring together a team of experts from medicine, nursing, healthcare professionals, patients, engineers, architects, lawyers and finance to produce a detailed and fully costed specification for the world's first Health and Social Care Robotics Testing and Evaluation Centre in the form of a fully simulated hospital and community care home. This will inform SBRI what type of facilities can be developed with further funding. We anticipate the capital infrastructure costs for the centre to be approximately £50M.

It is essential that the new centre is sufficiently flexible to adapt to new developments in robotics and their introduction into both current and future health and social care infrastructure.