UK health chiefs have underlined the need to protect a treasure trove of medical data as the industry embarks on a new digital era, amid the growing threat posed by cyber criminals to hospitals and their patients.
Speaking at the Arab Health conference in Dubai, senior NHS officials said there was huge potential in vast amounts of data mined in UK hospitals and clinics, every day.
Health data could be used to improve patient care, and the way they interact with treatments and medications, while also helping hospitals operate with greater efficiency.
Health care is an area where when you do your job well, someone else's life is better - If we get it right for them, it really is life changing
Matthew Trainer,
NHS Trust chief executive
“Our inability to transfer data is a problem to us and continues to be a problem,” said Ged Byrne, NHS director of global health and a surgical oncologist.
“We have 76 years of unfiltered data for the largest and oldest universal health public system in history. The amount of data that could potentially be useful if cleaned is limitless, and could potentially have a very positive impact on world health. That is for shaping healthcare response, pathway spend and governance. We've got data on just about everything you can possibly think of. It's genuinely big and extraordinary.”
Data-sharing challenges
Challenges include how to store huge volumes of data, and share it securely with other health systems around the world, including the UAE.
Cyber attacks on health systems have impacted millions of patients around the world in recent years, leaking sensitive information from names and social security numbers, to credit card numbers, medical data and sensitive clinical information.
In June last year, NHS England confirmed patient data was stolen in a ransomware attack by a Russian cyber criminal group. More than 3,000 hospitals and GP surgeries were disrupted as criminals attempted to extort money from the pathology testing company contract by the NHS, Synnovis.
“We're doing a million interactions over 16 hours, and our ability to record that in the data is improving, but sharing data is the issue,” Prof Byrne told The National.
“We have not yet developed a safe mechanism which satisfies all parties. There needs to be a much clearer set of standards against which we share data – that's really important, to understand how we leverage that data.”
UK-UAE collaboration
Medical tourism is a major aspect of the UAE's health industry. UK health institutions view the UAE and wider GCC as prime locations to establish outposts of existing hospitals and clinics.
London’s Kings College Hospital has a gleaming centre in Dubai Hills, while Moorfields Eye Hospital also has centres in Dubai and Abu Dhabi.
NHS leaders were in the UAE during Arab Health to discuss further collaboration and sharing of innovation, including the greater use of advanced technology.
AI can bring efficiencies
Ayub Bhayat, director of data services and deputy chief data and analytics officer at NHS England, said the use of AI will process the data to speed up care, cut waiting times and find new ways to deliver existing drugs for several conditions.
“We're on a journey to organise all the data assets into one repository, so AI will then do the heavy lifting, making clinicians’ lives easier to focus on the really important stuff,” Mr Bhayat said.
Mr Bhayat was responsible for the largest non-clinical procurement in NHS history – the £330 million ($410 million) Federated Data Platform – and is now leading the strategy of data transformation for the NHS.
The platform is being used to resolve common problems facing the NHS such as elective waiting lists and hospital capacity. It is being used by 71 NHS organisations.
AI can maximise availability in operating theatres, by prioritising patients based on their clinical data. In each hospital where it is used, doctors are seeing 119 extra patients a month, Mr Bhayat said.
Drug discovery is another area due to benefit from improved AI systems and data collection. By locating the right patients for the right trials, it is hoped AI can find wider suitability for certain medicines.
A vaccine for shingles, anti-inflammatory drug Ibuprofen and some antiviral drugs have been found to potentially delay the onset of dementia, in early research.
“These models can be run at speed as well to understand the impact of that drug,” said Mr Bhayat. “Since we've implemented this data platform, there's been a 54,000 additional surgeries taking place – that’s just using existing capacity of existing people. As we get more and more sophisticated, Generative AI will see the models start to self learn even more.”
Staffing and the global health workforce was another topic for discussion with NHS leaders during Arab Health. A long-standing global health worker shortage has gathered pace since the pandemic.
Global workforce shortage
In the US, hospitals heavily rely on foreign workers, with more than 2.6 million immigrants working in healthcare roles.
Meanwhile in the UK, Filipino workers make up 27 per cent of healthcare staff. A shortfall of 10 million health workers worldwide has been predicted by the WHO by 2030, with one in five nurses considering leaving the profession in the UK, Canada, the US, France and Belgium.
Matthew Trainer, chief executive of Barking, Havering and Redbridge University Hospitals NHS Trust (BHRUT), employs more than 8,000 staff. At Arab Health, he told The National that competition has made recruitment harder.
“Internationally, we all have the same set of challenges; the ageing population and workforce,” Mr Trainer said. “The pandemic has been a challenge because people have seen what it's like to work at the very sharp end of acute healthcare, and that was a very difficult phase for everybody.
“What we still see coming through in our newer recruits is people are attracted to the values of the NHS, particularly a younger workforce. Health care is an area where when you do your job well, someone else's life is better. If we get it right for them, it really is life-changing.”
Arab Health 2025 – in pictures
The specs
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Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
Mohammed bin Zayed Majlis
The Book of Collateral Damage
Sinan Antoon
(Yale University Press)
About Takalam
Date started: early 2020
Founders: Khawla Hammad and Inas Abu Shashieh
Based: Abu Dhabi
Sector: HealthTech and wellness
Number of staff: 4
Funding to date: Bootstrapped
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League A:
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League B:
Austria, Wales, Russia, Slovakia, Sweden, Ukraine, Republic of Ireland, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Northern Ireland, Denmark, Czech Republic, Turkey
League C:
Hungary, Romania, Scotland, Slovenia, Greece, Serbia, Albania, Norway, Montenegro, Israel, Bulgaria, Finland, Cyprus, Estonia, Lithuania
League D:
Azerbaijan, Macedonia, Belarus, Georgia, Armenia, Latvia, Faroe Islands, Luxembourg, Kazakhstan, Moldova, Liechtenstein, Malta, Andorra, Kosovo, San Marino, Gibraltar
Labour dispute
The insured employee may still file an ILOE claim even if a labour dispute is ongoing post termination, but the insurer may suspend or reject payment, until the courts resolve the dispute, especially if the reason for termination is contested. The outcome of the labour court proceedings can directly affect eligibility.
- Abdullah Ishnaneh, Partner, BSA Law
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Conflict, drought, famine
Estimates of the number of deaths caused by the famine range from 400,000 to 1 million, according to a document prepared for the UK House of Lords in 2024.
It has been claimed that the policies of the Ethiopian government, which took control after deposing Emperor Haile Selassie in a military-led revolution in 1974, contributed to the scale of the famine.
Dr Miriam Bradley, senior lecturer in humanitarian studies at the University of Manchester, has argued that, by the early 1980s, “several government policies combined to cause, rather than prevent, a famine which lasted from 1983 to 1985. Mengistu’s government imposed Stalinist-model agricultural policies involving forced collectivisation and villagisation [relocation of communities into planned villages].
The West became aware of the catastrophe through a series of BBC News reports by journalist Michael Buerk in October 1984 describing a “biblical famine” and containing graphic images of thousands of people, including children, facing starvation.
Band Aid
Bob Geldof, singer with the Irish rock group The Boomtown Rats, formed Band Aid in response to the horrific images shown in the news broadcasts.
With Midge Ure of the band Ultravox, he wrote the hit charity single Do They Know it’s Christmas in December 1984, featuring a string of high-profile musicians.
Following the single’s success, the idea to stage a rock concert evolved.
Live Aid was a series of simultaneous concerts that took place at Wembley Stadium in London, John F Kennedy Stadium in Philadelphia, the US, and at various other venues across the world.
The combined event was broadcast to an estimated worldwide audience of 1.5 billion.
The five pillars of Islam
1. Fasting
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4. Shahada
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New Zealand 21 British & Irish Lions 24
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British & Irish Lions
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Penalties: Farrell (4)
Conversions: Farrell
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Results
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Ads on social media can 'normalise' drugs
A UK report on youth social media habits commissioned by advocacy group Volteface found a quarter of young people were exposed to illegal drug dealers on social media.
The poll of 2,006 people aged 16-24 assessed their exposure to drug dealers online in a nationally representative survey.
Of those admitting to seeing drugs for sale online, 56 per cent saw them advertised on Snapchat, 55 per cent on Instagram and 47 per cent on Facebook.
Cannabis was the drug most pushed by online dealers, with 63 per cent of survey respondents claiming to have seen adverts on social media for the drug, followed by cocaine (26 per cent) and MDMA/ecstasy, with 24 per cent of people.
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Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
Joker: Folie a Deux
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HWJN
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Squad
Ali Kasheif, Salim Rashid, Khalifa Al Hammadi, Khalfan Mubarak, Ali Mabkhout, Omar Abdulrahman, Mohammed Al Attas, Abdullah Ramadan, Zayed Al Ameri (Al Jazira), Mohammed Al Shamsi, Hamdan Al Kamali, Mohammed Barghash, Khalil Al Hammadi (Al Wahda), Khalid Essa, Mohammed Shaker, Ahmed Barman, Bandar Al Ahbabi (Al Ain), Al Hassan Saleh, Majid Suroor (Sharjah) Walid Abbas, Ahmed Khalil (Shabab Al Ahli), Tariq Ahmed, Jasim Yaqoub (Al Nasr), Ali Saleh, Ali Salmeen (Al Wasl), Hassan Al Muharami (Baniyas)
![The UAE has collected 'close to 800,000 [sequences] in terms of numbers' under the Emirati Genome Programme. Khushnum Bhandari/The National](https://www.thenationalnews.com/resizer/v2/MKQMFEPM7CFV4RT63OHLMG656I.jpg?smart=true&auth=9c712c706fec9604c98d5e751ea82b861dafac6fa98121c8bfd6a5a5c5730063&bgcolor=000000&width=188&height=105)
