Health and Social Care Robotics Simulation Centre (HSCRSC)

英国的卫生和社会保健面临着人口老龄化和医疗保健改善带来的长期挑战，以及COVID-19和等待治疗的患者积压带来的短期挑战。NHS是世界上最大的雇主之一，在英格兰有大约140万全职员工。工资账单占总预算的近45%。据医院、心理健康服务机构和社区服务机构报告，目前缺少近8.4万名全职员工，其中3.8万名是护士。已同意提供额外资金，但如果卫生和社会保健的效率不发生重大变化，我们将永远无法赶上。所有形式的“数字化”都必须在这一变革中发挥主导作用，但英国，特别是NHS，在实施基于技术的变革方面没有良好的记录。许多保健和社会护理工作是，而且应该继续由专人提供，但也有许多活动可以由机器人安全、高效地完成。还有一些机器人可以和人类一起工作，帮助完成更高标准的任务（手术机器人已经在NHS中得到了有限的应用）。然而，在许多领域，机器人和机器人技术可以发挥更大的作用，并且在适当的时候，可以在无人监督的情况下工作，例如，搬运工，商店，清洁，消毒，图像分析（x射线，扫描等）。简单地将技术直接从研究实验室转移到临床和社会护理是失败的。我们需要的是一个中间的“试验场”阶段，在这个阶段，新的机器人技术可以在一个现实的环境（医院和社区）中由真正的用户（病人、工作人员等）试用和测试，但没有直接引入健康和社会护理的压力和风险。我们建议召集来自医学、护理、医疗保健专业人员、患者、工程师、建筑师、律师和财务方面的专家团队，以完全模拟的医院和社区养老院的形式，为世界上第一个健康和社会护理机器人测试和评估中心制定详细的、完全成本计算的规范。这将告知SBRI可以用进一步的资金开发哪种类型的设施。我们预计该中心的资本基础设施成本约为5000万英镑。至关重要的是，新中心要有足够的灵活性，以适应机器人技术的新发展，并将其引入当前和未来的卫生和社会保健基础设施。

Health and social care in the UK face long-term challenges from an ageing population and improvements in healthcare, and short-term challenges, from COVID-19 and the backlog of patients awaiting treatment.The NHS is one of the world's largest employers with around 1.4 million full-time equivalent (FTE) staff in England. The wage bill makes up nearly 45% of the total budget. Hospitals, mental health services and community providers are reporting a shortage of nearly 84,000 FTE staff, 38,000 of these are nurses.Additional funding has been agreed but without a major change in the efficiency of health and social care we will never catch up. "Digital" in all its forms must play a leading role in this change, but the UK, and the NHS in particular, does not have a good track record in implementing technology-based changes. Much of health and social care is, and should continue to be, delivered in person, but there are many activities that could be undertaken safely and much more efficiently by robots.There are also robots that work **with** humans, helping to perform tasks to a higher standard (Surgical robots are already used to a limited extent in the NHS). However, there are many areas where robots and robotics could play a much larger role and, when appropriate, work unsupervised, for example, portering, stores, cleaning, disinfection, image analysis (X-rays, scans etc).Simply transferring technology directly from the research laboratory to clinical and social care has a long history of failure. What is needed is an intermediate "proving ground" stage where new robotic technology can be tried and tested by real users (patients, staff etc.) in a realistic environment (hospital and community) but without the pressures and risks of direct introduction into health and social care.We propose to bring together a team of experts from medicine, nursing, healthcare professionals, patients, engineers, architects, lawyers and finance to produce a detailed and fully costed specification for the world's first Health and Social Care Robotics Testing and Evaluation Centre in the form of a fully simulated hospital and community care home. This will inform SBRI what type of facilities can be developed with further funding. We anticipate the capital infrastructure costs for the centre to be approximately £50M.It is essential that the new centre is sufficiently flexible to adapt to new developments in robotics and their introduction into both current and future health and social care infrastructure.