A National Clinical Strategy for Scotland - Summary

We're going to change the way the NHS works through introducing more new technology

Technology has enormous potential in the NHS. It can improve treatment success and safety, support patients to self-manage their conditions better, enable professionals to communicate with each other more effectively, and allow people (including those in rural areas) to access specialist support and advice remotely.

Technology also enables the service to generate lots of information and data to support improvement in clinical care and performance management. We now want to expand how we make use of data to, for instance, focus treatments more effectively and help us identify the outcomes that matter most to patients.

We've already seen the great advances science and technology have ushered into medical practice. A recent example is the science of genomics, which is enabling treatments to be tailored very precisely to match individuals' genetic make-up to help them gain maximum benefits. We can anticipate more of such advances in the future, and we must be ready to use them wisely and with greater certainty of benefit.