Welcome to this new podcast all about healthcare futures. We will be talking to a wide range of individuals, all of whom have a passion for creating a better healthcare future, and all of whom have a different idea of what the future of healthcare looks like and how we will get there. 

“The future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed… the future is not like the Isle of Wight or Mount Everest, a destination awaiting our arrival. The future is much more like the Forth Road Bridge or the Channel Tunnel. The future is something we have to imagine, design, plan and build,” says our first guest, Sir Muir Gray. 

Sir Muir is a healthcare professional who has been working in the industry for over 50 years, all the while delivering better healthcare. Sir Muir is probably best known for setting up screening programmes across the UK, but most recently he has been helping set up social enterprises in Oxford. 

In our first episode we talk with Sir Muir about the future of healthcare, what other futures have been predicted and what, with his experience, he thinks the future might be like. Sir Muir has been present for the start and the end of the second healthcare revolution, a former future that involved transplantations, hip replacements, cataract operations, chemotherapy, MRI and lab testing. 

But this revolution has run its course and Sir Muir believes we are doing too much of this sort of healthcare. For him, the future of healthcare is doing less of what we’re doing now and getting the public more engaged. That and finding out what the function of the doctor is in the age of AI and smartphones. 

In this episode:

• The future doesn't just happen, it is created 
• Sir Muir’s experience in healthcare
• His influence for what the future of healthcare might look like
• The second healthcare revolution
• Where we are doing too much healthcare
• Healthcare and wearables
• Why power now resides with citizens
• The biggest change will be with clinicians