Robotic NHS @ Monday


Seemingly the march of the robots is upon us.

Not only can the digital servants cut the lawn and provide endless fun for the family pet as it – the robot and not the dog – bruises around the living-room sucking up dust, but the NHS is seemingly considering employing artificial intelligence to carry out everyday tasks around the average ward.

Called Carebots, the plastic nurses will no doubt race around the wards emptying bedpans and deliverooing pizza’s thus freeing up valuable clinical resources.

According to Former health minister Lord Darzi, a leading surgeon, nearly a third of care staff tasks could be handed over to robots in a bid to save £13bn a year. Indeed, the Telegraph goes so far as to suggest that he is calling for ‘Full automation’ of health and social services. All well and good then from the man whom the London Journal of Primary Care says is ‘a great believer in bottom-up’.

Indeed, one can almost smell the robotic nurse advising the patient in bed four that she has come to collect the contents of colon number 42 and that he’d better be quick about it:

‘Please defecate into the provided patient bowl within the allocated 37 seconds otherwise unwarranted human medical input may or may not be instituted. Is that understood. Is that understood Is that understood ….

Duncan Harley is the author of The A-Z of Curious Aberdeenshire

Location: London, UK

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