Essays on AI, governance, and the NHS.

2025

Why NHS AI adoption needs systems thinking, not just solutions

The bottleneck isn't capability. It's the institutional architecture around it. When we frame AI adoption as a procurement problem, we miss the harder question: what conditions allow an institution to absorb transformative technology?

8 min read

2025

Aligning the regulators: lessons from building cross-body AI governance

Getting MHRA, NICE, CQC and NIHR into the same frame requires more than good arguments. It requires understanding each body's mandate, risk appetite, and what success looks like for them — then finding the shape that contains all four.

10 min read

2025

The AI and Digital Regulations Service: what it is and why it matters

For years, developers of AI tools in health faced a maze of overlapping regulatory bodies with different standards and timelines. This is the story of how we built a single front door.

7 min read

2024

On the gap between what AI can do and what health systems will use

Technical capability is the easy part. The hard part is organisational readiness — the governance structures, the clinical workflows, the procurement confidence, and the institutional trust that lets a hospital actually deploy.

9 min read

2024

The AI Ambassador Network: building a community of practice at scale

One year in, 2,400 subscribers, practitioners across the NHS sharing what's working. The lesson: communities of practice spread faster than policy mandates.

6 min read

2024

What the 10-Year Health Plan means for AI in the NHS

AI isn't a separate chapter in the long-term plan. It's threaded through every pillar. Understanding that changes how you think about the work.

8 min read

2023

AI imaging in the NHS: from pilots to national programmes

Lessons from running the national AI imaging programme — what accelerated adoption, what stalled it, and what it taught us about the difference between proving something works and making it stick.

11 min read

2023

Buying AI: why the NHS needed a guide and what we put in it

Procurement is where good AI products go to die in the NHS. We wrote a buyers guide to change that — based on what commissioners actually ask, and what vendors rarely explain.

7 min read