Hello, my name is Simon Gaffney and I am a physiotherapist and digital health specialist for allied health professionals at the Newcastle Hospitals.
I work alongside nursing and midwifery colleagues in Newcastle’s Digital Health team supporting our co-workers in the clinical environment to innovate and improve their ways of working in the digital sphere.
Our objective is to help to ensure technological development is clinically driven with patient safety, staff welfare and operational efficiency at the heart.
Collectively we bring our different backgrounds and experiences to the same tasks which offers a diversity of thought to the problems we solve.
My digital journey
Most of my career was spent in the corporate sector in a small business working with multinational companies on their internal communication delivery.
I retrained as a Physiotherapist because I believe very strongly in helping people to help themselves. I quickly realised my aspiration was to have as wide an impact as I could and that the skills I had developed throughout my varied career were well suited to influencing organisational and system-wide change.
The digital sphere is under-utilised in the NHS and has so much to offer to improve the lives of our patients, our staff and our organisation as a whole.
Harnessing the power of data
Digital adoption in the NHS has been slow to get off the ground when we compare it to other private and public industries. Data utilisation and artificial intelligence are of particular interest to me.
We have a wealth of data at our fingertips and this holds so much value. Properly harnessed, this could have a huge impact on how we deliver healthcare in our region.
In a national organisation where waiting times are high, staff are pressured and in short supply and demand for our services continues to grow, we must get smarter about how we deliver.
Advancements in artificial intelligence will give us, as healthcare professionals, the opportunity to do more of what we love and are good at – making a connection with our patients to understand them and their problems and helping them to solve them.
Contact us
If you have any burning issues or would like to get involved in our work we want to hear from you.
Email our Digital Health Team
