medtechbusiness blog

After nearly 40 years, the jury is still out on NLP as an approach to sales. Is it a potent weapon in the sales professional’s armoury, or is it a tired hangover from a decade of pseudo-scientific cults? How relevant is it to the medtech industry and its specialised market?

What is NLP?

NLP stands for Neuro Linguistic Programming, an approach to professional (and personal) life that emphasises how we ‘programme’ our own behaviour through the ways in which we think, speak and behave. In relation to sales, NLP offers strategies for modifying our own communication in order to influence the people we are doing business with. Some people see NLP as a useful collection of techniques. Others view it as a science of excellence in human behaviour. To sceptics, however, it is merely a corporate cult of jargon and self-delusion.

Yes: NLP is outdated

Sales expert Andy Preston presents his arguments for viewing NLP as irrelevant to the demanding environment of modern sales.

NLP is mostly outdated when it comes to sales, and is not as useful in the sales arena as most NLP trainers and supporters would have you believe.

You may be surprised to read that statement from someone who has trained in NLP and has many friends in the NLP community – a number of them being trainers in NLP itself. But that’s precisely why I can offer an unbiased opinion on the ‘value’ of NLP to the average sales person (or not).

I used to be a professional buyer. Then I became the top sales person in my industry. Now I travel all over the world, helping people to sell more. Here are the reasons why I think NLP isn’t as appropriate for sales as some people would have you believe:

Reason 1 – NLP was created nearly 40 years ago

NLP was ‘invented’ in the early 1970s at an American university. Nearly 40 years have passed since then, yet some people are still trying to tout NLP as the ‘latest’ technique. Have some things changed since the early 1970s? You bet they have! Buying patterns have changed, lifestyles have changed, people have changed, yet some people still claim nearly 40 years later that NLP is the panacea, the answer to everything. That’s very strange.

Reason 2 – The original concept had nothing to do with sales

When NLP was conceived, it was developed by studying therapy and psychotherapy (and a small number of individual therapists in particular). Nothing to do with sales! In fact, to this day the majority of NLP courses focus on learning the skills and techniques of therapists – not what you’d be expecting to learn if you’d booked on a course to improve your sales skills, is it?

Reason 3 – Your buyers are too ‘savvy’ to fall for the tricks

Buyers and decision makers are getting smarter these days. Gone are the days when you could copy body language to get on better with people. The very people you’re talking to have been on those courses and often comment on what you’re trying to do – not the result you are looking for.

Reason 4 – Instead of helping, NLP ‘skills’ can often damage your chances of making a sale

Far too many people come off an NLP course and focus too much on what ‘type’ of person they’re sitting in front of. They try to derive hidden meaning from every word, or watch for any kind of body movement. Do you think this could be counter-productive when trying to be ‘natural’ in front of a prospect? Of course it could! It’s likely to get you shown the door much faster than normal.

Reason 5 – Even the skills you do learn are difficult to apply in practice

Because NLP comes from an academic base, it’s very theoretical in nature. Plenty of NLP trainers will tell you how ‘useful’ it is for sales, yet often cannot sell themselves! I’ve met thousands of people trained in NLP (including many NLP trainers), but only a few have any kind of sales ability and most can’t even fill their courses with students. That’s not a great place from which to be teaching people how to sell better, is it?

Conclusion

Companies will achieve a far better ROI by identifying the core skills their sales people need, and working on these, than by getting them to learn extraneous techniques that will hamper their chances of making the sales.

Andy Preston is a leading sales expert. To find out more about Andy and read his free sales tips, visit www.andy-preston.com.

No: NLP is not outdated

NLP practitioner Richard White explains why, in his view, NLP can still be a relevant and potent sales technique.

Words are the tools of the trade for sales people. It’s not the words that count but how we use them. Neuro Linguistic Programming (NLP) provides a wealth of strategies that show us how to use words effectively to communicate, persuade and influence.

It’s fair to say that NLP has more than its fair share of jargon. A lot of NLP techniques were originally discovered by studying a number of top therapists. The aim was to teach the skills to other therapists, and so there is an element of therapy-related jargon. It is perfectly possible for sales people to learn and apply many of the strategies without the jargon. It does, however, require a bit of effort from the trainer, and many NLP trainers who work with companies do still use jargon.

It seems that the top communicators in any discipline share certain language patterns. Indeed, I have discovered that many advanced NLP language patterns can be found in top sales people who have never even heard of NLP!

Many areas of NLP involve language skills that can have a positive impact on sales effectiveness. The following are some practical applications:

Selling stories

This is my favourite application. I have never met a top sales person who does not use stories and metaphors. It is very effective for developing trusted relationships. It is also invaluable when selling complex products and services, where the benefits are not immediately obvious. Stories also have applications such as lead generation to make sales presentations persuasive and to pre-empt objections. Stories in sales are more like anecdotes than fairy stories.

Advanced questioning techniques

NLP provides a deeper understanding of questions and a number of very powerful questioning techniques. It also provides an understanding of how to structure questions to influence someone’s point of view. That can be useful in any area of sales, and especially in qualifying, discovering needs and overcoming objections.

Flexible communication

Top sales people are excellent at adapting their own language to match the way their clients and prospects prefer to communicate. They instinctively use the right kind of words to match how the way their prospects think. NLP gives sales people the ability to develop these skills and increase the range of people they can influence.

Advanced persuasion

NLP includes a number of strategies that are very subtle and can be used conversationally to put ideas across in a highly attractive way – and also to get prospects to see things differently. This has applications in all areas of sales, and especially in overcoming objections and negotiating.

When sales people really ‘get’ NLP, it’s like seeing a child in a sweet shop. Any one of the strategies can have a big impact once mastered. For some people it is a case of learning a new skill, and for others it’s a case of further developing an existing skill and understanding how else they can apply it.

Rather than learning all the NLP techniques together, another approach is to master one or two at a time. It is easy to understand a technique intellectually, but the real power comes when the technique is so ingrained you do not even have to think about it.

There are a lot of areas where NLP can help a sales person to increase their sales effectiveness significantly through improving their language skills. NLP at the basic level can be taught without the jargon, but even with the jargon the potential for greatly improved results makes it worth the effort.

Richard White is Managing Director of Pro-Excellence, a company providing business development coaching and mentoring for business owners, reluctant salespeople and non-sales staff. For more information, visit www.pro-excellence.com.
__________________________________________________________

Do you fancy an argument?

Would you like to be involved in a Medtech Business head-to-head debate?

Send us your views on a topic you feel strongly about. If we can find someone who disagrees with you, we’ll let debate commence.

E-mail joel.lane@healthpublishing.co.uk.

Harrogate International Centre, 9–11 November 2009

It was no pain, all gain at Wounds UK, where both the conference and the exhibition placed emphasis on the principles of collaborative working and communication. Medtech Business was there to meet and talk to our readers in the specialist areas of wound, stoma and skin care.

Land of silver and honey

Wounds UK 2009, which ran in parallel with Continence UK and Dermatology UK, provided educational opportunities and personal learning for a diverse range of health professionals in an increasingly multi-disciplinary area of healthcare. Approximately 1,300 delegates (about 100 more than in 2008) attended to learn how wound care companies are working with health providers to assist with the management of wounds in acute care, primary care, nursing homes and patients’ own homes.

Alongside the conference, around 70 wound care companies used exhibition stands and posters to demonstrate and explain their products and services. Many of them focused on wound prevention, long-term care of chronic wounds and strategies for working with community-based nursing and social care teams. It can’t always be like that, of course: posters from Smith & Nephew described the use of their wound care technologies in the context of severe military and landmine injuries. However, the demographic factors of obesity and the ageing population both mean that the balance of wound care is shifting towards longer-term issues.

The high profile of NHS Supply Chain at the exhibition reflected the organisation’s growing interest in wound care companies. Five of the exhibiting medtech SMEs mentioned to us that their products were now available on the drug tariff and distributed via NHS Supply Chain. The specialised nature of wound care means that having a wide range of therapies to call on makes all the difference in finding the best solution for any patient at any given time.

The most significant comment we heard on the value of Wounds UK for medtech companies was from a representative of BSN Medical: “A 50-minute symposium at Wounds UK has probably done as much for us in promoting Cutimed Sorbact [their new anti-microbial dressing] as we’ve achieved in six months of conventional sales and marketing.” When asked why he thought that was, he replied: “Because we’re trying to re-educate a market that’s been brainwashed with silver and honey for the last six or seven years by larger companies.”

Walking wounded

The exhibition brought together wound care, continence care and dermatology companies in a common space. An abundance of models, both plastic and human, demonstrated a wide variety of dressings for acute care and for everyday life. Highlights included the following:

• New company Systagenix was raising its profile and promoting its new Silvercel non-adherent dressing with an impressive stand that featured tissue-like fibreglass designs.

• Mölnlycke’s Wound Academy placed detailed information about its Safetac dessings around the tables of a free café.

• KCI’s stand featured a timeline of the company’s 33 years in the UK, ending with the question: “2010: are you ready for our next big thing?”

• ConvaTec’s interactive terminals enabled delegates to explore microsites on the Versiva XC dressing and other products based on the company’s hydrofiber technology.

• Coloplast was promoting two wireless healthcare innovations: the OnPos web-based wound care procurement service and the e-fficient digital pen and paper technology for recording wound assessment data.

• 3M used a lifesize virtual mannequin to promote its new clear absorbent dressing, 3M Tegaderm (motto: “Seeing is believing”).

• Biosurgery company ZooBiotic was promoting its new BioFOAM Maintenance dressing to prevent re-sloughing and re-infection after wound debridement.

• New company Prius Healthcare was using Wounds UK to launch its products and services (including orthopaedic and hospital mattresses) in the UK. A Prius representative commented that the new Framework Agreement has opened up the NHS market to SMEs.

• EHOB, launching the new Waffle Foot Hold among its static air products for wound prevention, also noted new commercial opportunities: NHS Supply Chain supplying podiatry and TV nurses, who take the product into hospitals and the community.

Rise and walk

The extensive poster display presented illustrated case histories and accounts of therapeutic pathways, placing a wide range of wound care brands in the context of treatment in acute care, primary care, nursing homes and the community. The posters, usually produced by clinical care teams and sponsored by wound care companies, demonstrated best practice in collaborative working and the use of innovative medical technologies to address difficult problems.

One poster described the use of the 3M Tegaderm dressing by a clinical team that combined biological, social and psychological approaches to heal a chronic leg ulcer after 22 years. Another described how the Kerraboot (from Ark Therapeutics) had been used to facilitate the healing of a chronic foot wound by “giving the patient ownership of his own care”. A third described a “dynamic care pathway” whereby three interventions, targeted towards different phases of wound healing, applied different products (Versajet, Vista and Acticoat) in the treatment of severe neuropathic foot ulceration.

Seize the day

The Wounds UK conference also reflected a focus on collaborative working and improved communication between the NHS and industry.

Heather Hodgson, a Tissue Viability Nurse in Glasgow and Clyde NHS Trust, spoke on ‘Working in partnership with industry to improve patient outcomes’. She described how she put together an audit team to assess the appropriateness of dressing regimes across the Trust, which is the largest in the UK. The audit team included representatives from ConvaTec, Mölnlycke, Smith & Nephew, Systagenix and ZooBiotic. It established that only 33% of dressing regimes were appropriate to the wound, and that the Trust was wasting £78 and 200 minutes of nurse time per day as a result. Further work on both sides, with industry providing product updates and revised evaluations, led to a re-audit six months later that found 100% success within the Trust in choosing appropriate dressing regimes.

Hodgson noted that this important project would be rolled out to other regions and other therapy areas. She concluded that “the wound care industry can offer immense support” to the NHS in improving its standards of care.

Guest speaker Chris Moon gave a remarkable presentation entitled ‘Negotiation – a survivor’s guide’. This was aimed at industry representatives trying to sell to NHS managers. Moon’s views on negotiation were based on his experience of being kidnapped by the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia and released three days later, having persuaded his captors not to kill him. He emphasised the importance of understanding the fears and needs of the person you are negotiating with. NHS people, Moon noted, tend to regard industry people as “ruthless mercenary lunatics”. Gaining respect and trust involves breaking down that negative perception.

Moon’s inclusive sensibility took his presentation a step beyond the usual canards of ‘motivational training’. His key message is that influencing is about connecting, which demands your full attention and engagement. He noted that in meetings, you can tell those who are “not really there” because they “suck the life out of you”. He concluded that, in the healthcare industry as in all types of business, professionals are learning to “see the bigger picture” and look beyond short-term results to sustainable relationships.

Medtech’s version of the Grinch takes a seasonal turn in his series of brief articles on things in business that don’t add value, are not cost-effective, waste time and money, and generally take you down a road of fail.

This time, in the festive spirit, I’m going to recommend something to you. (I’ll be carving the roast beast next.) It’s a small book of captioned photos, ideal for an office Secret Santa – especially if you’ve drawn the boss’ name. The book is Management Boll**ks by Richard Havers (Mirrorpix, £7.99).

As we’re not appearing on the shelves of W.H. Smith’s, we can safely inform you that the theme of Richard’s book is management bollocks. Otherwise known as empty jargon, business cant, doubletalk, Newspeak or just plain bullshit. The common language of all the piss-poor presentations, mind-numbing meetings and cretinous conferences you’ve ever had to get through by painting wide-open eyes on your eyelids – and afterwards, pretend it all had motivational value.

Management Boll**ks is as simple as its theme is tortured. It consists of images from old films and newsreels captioned with management-speak. There’s a night-club manager saying to three hostesses with identical skimpy outfits and hairstyles: “Good, I see you’ve all read the corporate identity manual.” And a butler saying to a despairing baroness: “I think we need to keep going forward in order to achieve a win-win, while not losing sight of our exit strategy.” And a very drab middle-aged man leaning over a terrified young lady and muttering in her ear: “Cheryl, I want you to be part of our ambitious change agenda.”

The beauty of this book is how it gently demonstrates the absurdity of office dialect by showing how far it is from any real experience. This is not the language of the street, the sports field or the home, however much your boss may pretend it is. This is the dead air of pretension and intellectual decay. It has all the spontaneity of a politician’s jokes, all the natural grace of a drunk trying to prove his sobriety by walking in a straight line.

Make it your New Year resolution not to think outside the box, push the envelope, identify the win-win, benchmark the blue sky or future-proof the bottom line. Because if you send out bullshit, you will undoubtedly get nothing but bullshit back. And you’ll deserve it.

Do you agree with Ted? Do you disagree? Let us know! Append your comments to Ted’s blog at www.medtechbusiness.co.uk.

Nick Woods is CEO of Tissuemed Ltd, based in Leeds. Tissuemed, a specialist medtech company, develops and manufactures the TissuePatch brand of self-adhesive sealant films for use in surgery.

What are your main priorities as CEO of Tissuemed? How do you divide your time between different aspects of the business?

Tissuemed has a great opportunity before it in the form of its adhesive surgical film. We have a new technology there that surgeons are telling us can really help them do their job, improve patient outcomes and, crucially, provide economic benefits. Our main priority is to ensure that this technology is adopted by surgeons as standard of care – so it’s about ensuring we’re communicating with enough potential users in the right way and helping them see what TissuePatch can do for them.

Regarding how I divide my time: that’s a very pertinent question, because Tissuemed is an R&D company with on-site manufacturing including chemical synthesis, full regulatory department, sales and marketing. As you might imagine, keeping all the plates spinning as a small entity is challenging, so I wouldn’t claim to have a formula for how I divide my time.

In fact it’s an easy question: the people who run our different departments function so well that my interventions are mostly limited, with my predominant focus being on sales and marketing.

How have Tissuemed and its products developed?

The company was founded in 1985 by surgeons from Killingbeck Hospital in Leeds. It originally developed tissue heart valves, that side of the business being divested in 1999. Since that time, the focus has been on developing polymer-based methods of enhancing the closure of internal wounds during surgery.

Initially we worked on light-activated glues; but for the past seven years all focus has been on developing adhesive sheets that bond to the proteins on tissue surfaces, and as such provide almost a secondary closure over the sutures or staples. It’s easiest to think of our product as ‘clingfilm’ for surgeons, except that it adheres to the tissues with far greater strength.

Tissuemed has just announced 100% sales growth in the last 12 months. To what strategies would you attribute the company’s success?

I think we’ve got a well-developed product offering that has come about through actively listening to surgeons and observing their needs. I think our success has come from our experience in understanding the surgical field, coupled with the adaptability and all-round brilliance of our chemists in developing the technology. That and persistence… this has been a seven-year process!

Quite incredibly, we do everything under one roof: from synthesising the sticky polymers through to casting the synthetic absorbable materials into fine multilayered films. It’s a highly skilled operation with a great deal of know-how, so we prefer to keep it in-house as far as possible. I’ve only been involved with Tissuemed for a couple of years, but those who’ve brought it to where it is today should feel very proud of what they’ve achieved. It’s no mean feat.

How does Tissuemed plan to deal with the challenges of the business climate in the coming years?

I think we’re in really good shape in that regard. There’s no doubt that healthcare providers across the world are increasingly recognising the place of new technology in their quest to provide better outcomes, clinically and economically. I think it’s highly desirable for new technologies to tick the boxes of reducing surgical time, reducing patient complications, improving surgical outcomes and, in so doing, reducing in-patient stay.

Leakage of wounds created in internal organs are something of an occupational hazard. In lung surgery, for example, something like 10% of cases have residual air leaks post-surgery that take many days to resolve. We’re collecting data to suggest that by applying our film over the resection staple line, air leaks are significantly reduced and patient stay comes down as a result.

The same is true in neuro- and spinal surgery, where leaks of cerebrospinal fluid can be extremely problematic and can even require further operations. Simply by covering the potentially leaky area with our absorbable film, the surgeon is able to stop the leak pretty much instantly; the product then disappears over time as the wound heals.

You could say the business climate favours our product, because of the pressure on hospitals to cut costs while improving outcomes. But then, when did anyone not want to improve patient outcomes? Our product would always have been in demand, but in the present economic climate it’s truly needed – and we’ve been ready to take advantage of that need through an effective sales and marketing operation.

Everyone’s talking about innovation – but what does it really mean? David Newton of the Commercial Procurement Collaborative explains why the NHS may sometimes fear medtech innovation, but can’t get by without it.

How does the NHS define ‘innovation’ in terms of its own priorities where medical technologies are concerned?

The priorities are laid out in various strategic documents from the Department of Health. Innovation is one of the things we’re targeted with providing – which is odd in itself, because if you’re an innovator you can’t really be schooled in how to innovate: you just come along with an innovation.

In practical terms the NHS is looking for three things. One is incremental change to processes, practices or equipment – something like the electric kettle being developed into the cordless kettle. But then there’s process change, whereby the innovation is a wholesale movement from one set of practices to an alternative set of practices for delivering the same piece of healthcare. The third type of innovation is where what you’re attempting to do is changed, as well as how you achieve it.

Medical technologies fit into all three of those areas. But also, innovation can use an existing device in a new context. One recent technology I saw was a well-established piece of kit where someone had said: “Oh, I can do this with that and it will make a difference in healthcare.” That ability to adapt something from the food industry, the car industry or whatever, I call ‘poaching’ innovation.

Then there’s using technologies to change where healthcare is delivered: making better use of information flows, the ability to make things smaller and more resilient. That can lead to wholesale step changes, such as the movement of care from an expensive delivery mechanism to a less expensive one or one whereby more people can benefit. That’s the key thing about some of the community programmes we’re now seeing: they deliver because they allow a greater number of people to access a healthcare facility simultaneously.

An example of a major step change is remote monitoring. When I started in nursing back in the 90s, one of the new technologies we had in the hospital was a system that allowed us to monitor the heart rate and rhythm of a cardiac patient from another ward via radio waves. Now I see pilot studies that enable us to monitor patients in different counties: they stay at home and we’re able to screen them remotely, we’re able to make sensible diagnoses. So in two decades, we’ve come a long way.

The risks of coming into hospital are nullified for many of those patients, because you can say that the best treatment for a patient’s cardiac condition is a specific drug therapy, or an intervention that requires hospitalisation, or just further monitoring. All of those options are opened up without the patient needing to access hospital care, with immense benefits for the patient and for the NHS.

How does the NHS define ‘value’ and ‘cost’ in healthcare? To what extent is the former replacing the latter as a driver of NHS procurement decisions?

There is ostensibly a lot of talk at a very high level in the health service about ‘value’, and we’re starting to hear people talk about ‘investing to save’ and programmes of that ilk, whereby a value is placed on spending money on resources that will enable an overall betterment and a saving downstream. But that’s only starting to be talked about by the hierarchy, and it may take the next 48 months to filter down to the ground level where the impact will be experienced by people trying to put products before the procurement teams. Procurement teams have talked about value for a long time, but in my view a lot of that has just been talk.

Value is about a full assessment of where a product will bring benefits across a broad range of areas. Are there patient benefits, benefits to healthcare staff, benefits to the delivery system, overall corporate benefits to the organisation? There is an attempt to place numbers on those, so we can say: “If we do A, B and C, the overall impact of that is a cost of £1m. If we do X, Y and Z, the delivery outputs are the same but the overall cost will be £500k.” There is overall recognition that that’s how we should be thinking.

However a lot of people haven’t broken free of the shackles of cost. They talk of ‘unit prices’ and the like – even though we’ve moved from the attitude that it’s better to buy a 50p pen than a £1 pen to the consideration that we’re also interested in how long the pen will give us ink. People have moved to a whole-life view, a view where you take into account the costs of purchase, use and disposal, instead of regarding unit price as the bottom line. But this isn’t going far enough into what value truly is, and that’s where we’re still struggling.

The NHS is putting a lot of investment and time into looking at the environmental impact of the way that we purchase things and of the things that we purchase. There’s an increasing awareness of our corporate responsibility. For example, the vehicle footprint of the NHS, the logistics of moving kit around, is something we’re very focused on at present. There’s also a lot of thought about inward investment: how we can contribute back to our communities. It’s well established (from the Black report and others) that a poorer community is less healthy. So we’re trying to work with local communities, using the regional development agencies to help make people aware that a product manufactured locally may be just as good as one from overseas.

But one of the biggest barriers is still silo mentality. That won’t be news to anyone in medtech, I’m certain. I think we’ve got another two or three years before we can start to see the behaviour of senior managers moving away from a protective stance towards more collaboration. That’s the whole point of Invest To Save: it will span over these silos, enable the redistribution of monies and create a compensation mechanism, so that when a clinic in the community is able to carry out a procedure, the fact that it takes ‘business’ away from a hospital isn’t seen as threatening: it’s seen as facilitating other things the hospital can do.

These changes are themselves innovative. Part of the process is ‘show and tell’ – for example: “This project we’ve done in Scarbororough has moved asthma care back to the patients’ homes. It’s meant that in the hospitals, you’re actually able to see five other patients off your waiting list in the time that you would have allocated to caring for asthmatic patients.” The benefit was there – but unfortunately it threatened the income for the budget holder, because they weren’t being paid for procedures in the tariff system. So ward resistance was quite high. This must frustrate people in medtech. If someone’s paying but doesn’t feel they are gaining benefit, there will be resistance. Purchasers have been asked (and strategically appointed) to be very inward-looking for the last 10 years or so, and now we’re saying, “You’ve got to look at the broader picture.”

That mindset change will come, but it will be another commissioning cycle before people really understand what it means. The community trusts will go through a cycle to commission all of the services over the next five years, and then we’ll start to see some real changes happening – because of the learning demonstrated by the braver community trusts, who’ve commissioned services from organisations working in innovative ways and with new technologies. When they can demonstrate how this has made a difference, that’s when it will take off. So the real shift from cost to value will be another five years in coming, but then it will move with exponential speed because people will have real NHS evidence.

How important is the shift of healthcare from the hospital to the home and the community in driving NHS uptake of new medical technologies?

From a strategic point of view, it’s obvious that it’s necessary. The difficulty comes in where the power base for the NHS has traditionally been. The NHS set a mentality in place that hospitals are the place of healthcare – because Bevan had to broker deals with the providers in those institutions to bring them into the NHS, and doing that built a corporate philosophy whereby the power sits with the acute providers.

There is an attempt now by the DH, with world class commissioning coming to the fore, to move some of that power base back to the community, back to local people so that they can start to make decisions as to how their healthcare should be provided. But you are fighting against the inertia of a very big system. A lot of investment has gone into the big teaching hospitals, and to a lesser extent the general hospitals – it’s hard to step away from that, and a lot of care will still have to be delivered in those environments.

But increasingly, for chronic illnesses that are more about managing people and improving their daily life than curing the presenting illness, much more of that care needs to be happening in the community. That’s where medtech can really help us. For example, each SHA prepared a document in response to the Darzi review to say what it was going to focus on, what was important in its region. In Yorkshire & Humber, the needs identified included obesity management, chronic respiratory illnesses and diabetes. In each case, there was a recognised need to enable patients to be cared for in their environment rather than coming into hospitals for tests and procedures. Medical technology facilitates a lot of that work happening.

The difficulty the medtech sector will face is the resistance to moving care pathways wholesale. For acute hospital providers, it means moving some of the work they’ve traditionally done. That’s a threatening shift for many people in personal terms. Recognising that is something the medtech sector needs to look at and work with: how to move people through a change process. It’s all very good to present us with a piece of kit that will benefit patients and the NHS – but what is often more difficult is to deal with the psychology of the changes. I think a better understanding of that would facilitate adoption more quickly and smoothly.

This is one of the issues that the new National Technologies Adoption Centre in Manchester is working through: when they put a new piece of technology through its paces with clinical staff, one of the main things they’re investing time in is the process of moving care from one arena to another, and how you make that acceptable to the incumbent providers.

Does the prospect of severe NHS spending restrictions over the next five years threaten the innovation agenda defined by Lord Darzi’s ‘next stage review’?

No, I think the exact opposite is true. I genuinely think it presents a real opportunity for the innovation agenda, because the only way we can meet and continue to meet the needs of our communities within the NHS framework – which is, as you say, one in which spending restrictions are predicted, certainly for five years and potentially for longer – is by doing things differently and in a much smarter way.

The whole solution is not medtech, but I think medtech is a big part of that solution: an advance in technologies, and an acceptance that technology we use in our own lives is also applicable at work. For example, someone might happily use a mobile phone with global positioning satellite technology to take, label and transmit a photo, but if you ask them to do that in patient care – by taking a photo of a wound in a patient’s home and sending it to someone 50 miles away to get immediate feedback and guidance – somehow they can’t make that step change.

But there is a growing realisation that we have to. Spending pressures are focusing people’s minds on how to adopt this new technology and demonstrate that it brings benefits in value and in delivering better healthcare. So I think it’s an opportunity.

A recurrent mantra in the medtech industry is “The NHS is resistant to innovation.” Is that true? What do companies that want to lead a new wave of healthcare technology need to keep in mind?

That mantra is also shared within the NHS. Individual organisations and people can be resistant to innovation because it represents change, which can be difficult to manage and to deal with. But it needn’t be the case. People are beginning to see that it’s OK to have an idea and to try something. So there’s a move away from being averse to taking a chance towards understanding that if you try something, providing you do so safely, then sometimes these new technologies and ways of doing things work beautifully to help everybody.

The biggest issue is not the technology itself. People can usually understand the process and the pathways that new technology might open up for them and for the patient. What is difficult for them is dealing with the change of practice. I would say to companies: be aware of that in the way you present your technologies to us. Not only saying ‘this is what it can achieve in the long term’ but also telling us what that journey will look like: how we get from where we are now to where the new technology can enable us to be. Filling that gap is partly the responsibility of the companies and partly our responsibility in the NHS.

Partnership working is something we’re trying to move towards, and certainly something we’re more and more keen on is a dialogue process so we can better understand what companies are offering us. How to get there is as important as why we should get there. Being more open to working together is something I would ask of my colleagues in the NHS as well as those in medtech.

David Newton is a Clinical Procurement Nurse Specialist, Co-Chairperson of the National Network of Clinical Procurement Specialists and member of the Commercial Procurement Collaborative (CPC).

I genuinely think [the prospect of NHS budget cuts] presents a real opportunity for the innovation agenda, because the only way we can meet and continue to meet the needs of our communities within the NHS framework is by doing things differently and in a much smarter way.