Challenging times with real opportunities: a round up of day 2 at the 2022 GS1 UK Healthcare Conference

If day one of the 2022 GS1 UK Healthcare Conference highlighted the need to consider organisational culture in implementing barcode scanning for clinical traceability, day two highlighted the need to consider the bigger picture as well.

Our opening speaker was Richard Murray, chief executive of noted think tank The King’s Fund. He has been working in health policy for many years but revealed he “cannot remember such a busy time” or one “with quite so many moving parts”.

Addressing the backlogs exacerbated by the pandemic is already a huge task, he said. But it sits alongside workforce challenges and the complication of national reform of the health and social care system. And, as Dr Andrew Goddard highlighted, the issue of covid itself remains.

“Whilst politically it’s very nice to think the pandemic is fizzling out, that’s not the case,” said Andrew, a practising gastroenterologist and the president of the Royal College of Physicians. “We have to get used to having covid as part of our working lives,” he added.

It is a very difficult picture, but both Richard and Andrew did see potential positives: not least that the pandemic has often created an environment for innovation and, particularly, for more rapid digital progress.

Delegates heard from multiple speakers who described plans to seize those opportunities. That included colleagues in Wales and Scotland, who are advancing plans to implement Scan4Safety in their own countries.

As Andy Smallwood of NHS Wales Shared Services Partnership began to detail the project in his nation, he said he felt a need to apologise for all the ideas he had stolen from other speakers and organisations.

Yet here is one of the fundamental purposes of the GS1 UK Healthcare Conference: to unite people who are implementing scanning to increase healthcare efficiency, value for money, and safety.

Being able to bring people together face-to-face once more –?many attendees back at an in-person conference for the first time since the start of the pandemic – made this year's event a particularly special one.

“Bringing people together is what we do,” said GS1 chief executive Anne Godfrey in drawing the main conference sessions to a close. “And we’re here to help you use our standards to keep people safe and well.”

A huge thank you to all our speakers, sponsors and exhibitors for making the conference both possible and such a success.

Content from the event will soon be available on our website, but in the meantime see the hashtag #bettercarecostsless for live reaction from both days.

And if you joined us in person, please do complete our feedback form. For every form completed, we will donate ￡5 to the Disaster Emergency Committee’s Ukraine Humanitarian Appeal.