In collaboration with NHS Providers, the National Health Executive has published a white paper on how Medinet are working with the NHS across the UK – not just to analyse the well publicised waiting list and reasons behind this, but to provide, safe, practical solutions that are robust enough to reduce the wait both in the short and long term.

NHS Providers’ Interim Deputy Chief Executive, Miriam Deakin, said: “There’s a lot of really good work going on, but it is in a really challenging context.”

The report documents that the people joining and waiting for elective treatment, quite plainly, aren’t going away quietly and whilst NHS staff are working tirelessly against this tidal wave of backlog our NHS partners are drawing in every inch of support from Medinet to provide additional clinical capacity solutions.

Amidst all the spreadsheets, all the numbers, and all the statistics, each figure represents a real person and there are real-life consequences this backlog is having on people. Every day a person’s surgery or treatment gets delayed, their condition will continue to deteriorate, further stripping them of their quality of life, their ability to work and, in some cases, even their lives.

Medinet’s own Medical Director, Jean Challiner, said: “We pride ourselves on being a clinical organisation that is very patient focused and quality focused. We’ve very much expanded the scope of what we do and the complexity of what we do to meet current requirements.”

As we enter this new era of cooperation, catalysed by the recent introduction of the Integrated Care Systems, the solution is conceptually quite simple: collaboration. And as the elective care provider of choice, Medinet can provide the NHS – and its patients – with the largest and most diverse clinical pool of expert healthcare professionals through a myriad of service models, helping arrest the backlog and keeping the NHS where it should be. As a world leader in healthcare.

I had the opportunity to collaborate with endoscopy medical teams from various trusts nationwide. I was involved in developing a novel method of administering throat spray with my team, and we carried out an audit which is now published. This study was partly developed during the pandemic, focusing on improving patient comfort and reducing the incidence of cough at the height of COVID.

We compared two techniques of administering an anaesthetic throat spray before endoscopy. The commonly used method involves spraying lignocaine on the back of the patient’s pharynx with their mouth open: the “mouth-open” technique. The new method of administration involved asking the patient to close their mouth after insertion of the nozzle and confirmation that it was close to the pharynx. This closed-mouth method is called the JASMEG technique.

The JASMEG technique was superior: it reduced patient cough, reduced patient anxiety levels, decreased patient pulse rates and, most importantly, increased patient comfort. Additionally, it is a statistically better method of administering local anaesthetic spray than the conventional “mouth-open” method. It also lessened the potential of pathogens being spread by cough-induced aerosols.

When asked how we thought of this “JASMEG” technique, we remembered that our Grandparents always taught us not to eat with our mouths open, as we were more likely to choke!

I could not have done this audit study without the help and collaboration of my Endoscopy Teams, and especially Dr Jude A Oben, consultant in gastroenterology-hepatology. I’m excited to present this Audit study at the British Society for Gastroenterology meeting this week in Liverpool.