The grand challenge of health and care
Health and care systems around the world are struggling, facing the grand challenge of addressing wicked problems undermining health, while ensuring their own sustainability.
In high-income countries, including the UK, Europe, North America, and parts of Asia, populations are aging, health and social care is becoming more expensive, waiting times are rising, and public perceptions of quality are declining. In Low- and Middle-Income Countries (LMICs) healthcare quality often remains inadequate. Globally, social determinants of health, including poverty, inequality, pollution, poor lifestyles, and diets, continue to undermine population health.
There is also a global shortage of health workers while existing health workers are experiencing burnout and taking industrial action over poor pay and conditions. The World Health Organization (WHO) described these workforce issues as ‘a ticking timebomb’, which poses the risk of ‘health systems collapse’.
Concurrently, new medical and digital health technologies, including Artificial Intelligence (AI), precision and personalised medicine, promise to transform health and care, preserve and prolong life. Yet, beyond the hype, we need to understand better how to introduce and organize innovations, technologies, the ‘business of health’, entrepreneurship, and intrapreneurship in ways that are sustainable and beneficial to health workers, patients, and populations.
Health and Care Research and Teaching at King’s Business School
Health and care are a key focus in King’s Business School, where more than 30 of its academic experts are engaged in research and teaching addressing health and care challenges, in ways aligned with King’s College London’s wider mission to ‘make the world a better place’.
We are collaborating locally (including with Guy’s & St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust, King’s College Hospital Foundation Trust, South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust, South East London Integrated Care Board, and King’s Health Partners), nationally and internationally to make a positive impact on health and care.
Research
Our health and care research broadly focuses on three key themes:
Technology: Examining the development and implementation of health and care technologies in ways that are sustainable and beneficial to health workers, patients, and populations.
Workforce: Examining how to reconfigure, recruit, retain, train, regulate, manage, lead, and develop policy and technology to support, sustain, and improve the health and care workforce.
Organisation: Examining modes of organisation, collaboration, integration, funding, regulation, governance, collective and system leadership, management, commercialisation, spinouts, entrepreneurship, and policy that improve and sustain health and care.
Our research spans levels of analysis, from macro-level policy overviews (e.g. health workforce planning), meso-level studies of organising (e.g. networks in health) and professions (e.g. regulation of professions), to micro-level studies of health and care practices (e.g. robotic surgery).
Our research aims to significantly impact health and care and thus make the world a better place.
Teaching
We also provide teaching at undergraduate, postgraduate, and executive levels addressing key health and care challenges.
Events
King’s Business School holds regular events, workshops, and talks focused on issues relating to health and care.
Further Information
For more information about health and care research, teaching, and events at King’s Business School, please contact Professor Gerry McGivern: gerry.mcgivern@kcl.ac.uk.
For more information about King’s Business School’s academic staff with expertise in health and care, see the links below: