Curistica's Dr Keith Grimes and Dr Youssof Oskrochi are co-author's on a peer-reviewed paper just published in BMJ Innovations, alongside Elliott Roy-Highley, and Sam Shah.
"Unfit for the future? Revisiting the national cross sectional study of digital clinical safety in England's NHS to identify drivers of low compliance and implications for the 10 Year Health Plan" analyses 14,848 digital health technologies across 239 NHS organisations. The headline finding: 70% lacked documented clinical safety assurance. Only 17% were fully assured against clinical risk standards.
The paper goes further than describing the scale of the problem. It identifies four interlocking reasons why compliance is so low: inadequate understanding of safety standards, immature governance infrastructure, ineffective assurance processes, and the persistent treatment of Clinical Safety Officer roles as something to absorb into an existing job rather than a dedicated function. The average CSO resource across the organisations surveyed was 1.3 full-time equivalents at trusts and 0.4 at integrated care boards.
The timing of this is important. The NHS 10 Year Health Plan is built around rapid adoption of AI, genomics, and robotics. The paper argues that without structural changes to how digital clinical safety is resourced and regulated, including CQC oversight, formalised CSO career pathways, and integration into national quality frameworks, that ambition risks doing harm at scale.
Read the paper in BMJ Innovations
