Search our Innovation Portfolio

Each year in the UK, approximately 700,000 people suffer from pressure (decubitus) ulcers (bed sores). These predominantly affect older individuals, as well as obese and spinal injury patients. They cause discomfort, lead to longer hospital stays, increase mortality rates, and costs the NHS over £1.4m daily. Tunley Environmental's predictive AI tool will aid healthcare decisions for management and prevention of pressure ulcers, tailored specifically to patients, reducing prolonged post-hospital care. This tool will also calculate environmental impacts and show how more efficient care can improve the environmental impacts of the care provided. Ultimately this tool will make accurate predictions about patient outcomes given an individual’s patient data, yielding the most effective clinical pathway at the lowest carbon/economic cost.

Our 3000+ prostate cancer patients visit GPs and community sites to receive blood testing every 3-6 months, which is 16,000 visits a year on average. Each one of these tests builds up carbon emissions from the miles travelled by patients to care sites. We will be trialling the use of at-home finger prick blood tests for patients, to help reduce carbon emissions and create a more convenient experience for patients who are often monitored in this way for the rest of their lives.

The NHS Elective Surgical Hubs provide high-volume low-complexity surgery to patients across England. This project aims to develop a framework for surgical hubs to measure their ‘environmental impact’ across the entire patient journey. The Key Performance Indicators developed can be used as a benchmark quantifying sustainability performance, allowing the impact of subsequent quality improvement projects to be objectively measured. The high-level nature of these metrics will also allow a comparison in sustainability performance between surgical hubs and enable different centres to share good practice.