Barclay calls urgent ‘hackathons’ over ambulance crisis

The new health and social care secretary has asked officials to hastily organise several “hackathons” to try to address the crisis in ambulance performance.

The first, which was instigated just last week, will take place tomorrow (28 July), and a second is planned for August, sources told HSJ.

Messages from officials described the work as a “request from our new secretary of state” and explained the short notice by saying he was “pushing… quite strongly for something before the end of the month”.

The aim is said to be to examine what is driving poor performance, and the Department of Health and Social Care is “particularly interested in understanding which factors reduce risk to patients”, according to one message seen by HSJ.

Hackathons are short, time-limited collaborative design events, typically involving computer programmers and data scientists or analysts, which aim to result in working software or product on the chosen theme by the end.

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Source: HSJ, 27 July 2022