The challenges facing the health and social care system are considerable — with competing pressures from an ageing population, increasing numbers of patients with multiple morbidities, new technologies, and the need for increasing efficiencies. The complexity of the system, along with the multiple pressures it faces, mean that efforts to improve it often achieve only limited benefits and can have unforeseen consequences. Over the past two decades, there have been numerous calls to implement a more holistic systems approach to transform health and care to address the needs of a changing population.
In the Technology and Systems theme, our aim is to use an engineer’s eye to help identify challenges in health and care systems and work with engineers and public health researchers to both design more effective and resilient health and care systems and to better inform treatment through the identification of the technologies needed to improve public health and individual patient care.
Going forward, this theme will work with the Cambridge Public Health pillars to better understand how healthcare systems behave, and how to improve or sustain that behaviour most effectively.
The Technology and Systems Theme is led by Dr Tom Bashford.
Submit a poster now to the 2022 Cambridge Public Health Showcase, which we’re holding in person at the Cambridge Union on June 23rd, 2022.
For several decades, malaria has caused the deaths of tens of millions of people especially in sub-Saharan Africa. It caused 229 million cases and 409,000 deaths globally in 20191. In fact, every 2 minutes, a child dies from malaria accounting for about 67% of all malaria deaths worldwide1.