Healthcare at home in Tayside is focus of new MedTech event in Dundee
Growing pressure on Tayside's NHS highlights the need for new ways to deliver care, including using technology to treat more people at home, a new event in Dundee is to hear.
The Tay Health Tech Conference 2025 on 21 May is the first of three annual conferences which hope to accelerate the development of a growing medical devices cluster in Tayside.
Speakers and participants at the event will include local people from Tayside and Angus who are part of a ‘Citizens’ Assembly’ helping medical device researchers with their work.
Our mission is to improve access to healthcare for everyone in Tayside, regardless of where they live, who they are, or their financial situation.
Leaders from NHS 24, NHS Tayside and the Scottish Ambulance Service will also address the event, which is free and open to members of the public, healthcare industry professionals and researchers.
New health and care technologies being showcased at the event will include a new artificial intelligence tool for skin cancer detection being rolled out at NHS Tayside and a series of device innovations from Scottish research teams, including contactless blood pressure monitoring, wearable devices to support Parkinson's disease and robotic monitoring for cardiovascular disease. These have won more than £500,000 in funding from a £1m Tay Health Tech fund being used to fast-track medical technologies that could bring health and care closer to communities in Tayside and reduce health inequalities.
Vicky Farquhar, Project Manager for Tay Health Tech, explained: “Our mission is to improve access to healthcare for everyone in Tayside, regardless of where they live, who they are, or their financial situation. In rural parts of Tayside, the nearest hospital can be many miles away, and the technologies we develop will help to close that gap, allowing more people to receive healthcare at home, or to return home from hospital sooner.”
Tay Health Tech is a four-year, place-based project focused on developing medical technologies that could help patients be treated in their homes or local communities – for example community clinics or social clubs – rather than in big centralised hospitals, which can sometimes be difficult for patients to get to.
The project is led by Heriot-Watt University in Edinburgh and the University of Dundee in collaboration with partners including University of Glasgow, University of St Andrews, Edinburgh Napier University, NHS Tayside Innovation, which supports innovators in the healthcare system, and Dundee City Council.
Tay Health Tech’s other consortium partners are Angus Council, Dundee and Angus College, healthcare innovation partnership InnoScot Health, life sciences partnership BioDundee, medical research specialist SHARE, Scotland's business advice, support and funding agency, Scottish Enterprise, and UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) – the UK’s national funding agency for investing in science and research.
Tayside has the UK’s highest proportion of the public using the NHS as their sole healthcare provider, at 93%.
Factors behind this include less availability of private healthcare providers in remoter areas and affordability.
Rising patient numbers, the ageing population, falling numbers of GPs and GP practices and a decreasing real-terms budget are increasing pressure on the National Health Service in Scotland, the Tay Health Tech partners say.
But they add that Tayside also has huge opportunities, including GP practices, community hospitals and two large hospitals. This includes Ninewells in Dundee, one of the largest teaching hospitals in Europe.
Tom Steele, Chair of the Scottish Ambulance Service, is the keynote speaker at the Tay Health Tech Conference 2025. He said: “Being taken to hospital in an ambulance isn’t always the most appropriate response or the best experience for the patient. We’re already helping more patients to be treated at home or in their local communities, and new technologies like remote monitoring can only help us to get more effective at that. Translating early stage research into new patient-centred services is important – but it’s also vital that significant effort is put in to ensuring those innovations are widely adopted and used.”
The Tay Health Tech Citizens Assembly will also lead a session at the conference, as part of their role to ensure local voices contribute to health-related innovation.
The Citizens’ Assembly is a group of 30 people from Perthshire, Dundee and Angus. They include local people who want to help with health-related research and others who took part in a series of Tay Health Tech workshops last year with NHS Tayside patients in Dundee, Perth, Arbroath and Cupar Angus. These workshops helped identify four ‘Grand Challenges’ that underpin Tay Health Tech’s search for innovative medical devices – Hospital at Home, Rehabilitation, Testing, and Prevention and Prognostics.
Tay Health Tech is part of a four-year programme to help research and innovation clusters deliver positive impact in their local areas through collaboration with local authorities, businesses, residents and other research organisations.
The programme is funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), which is the main funding body for engineering and physical sciences research in the UK and part of UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) – the UK’s national funding agency for investing in science and research.
The Tay Health Tech Conference 2025 is being hosted at the Discovery Point visitor attraction in Dundee, which is home to the historic research ship of British Antarctic explorer, Captain Scott. The event includes refreshments, lunch and an opportunity to visit a Tay Health Tech exhibition and samples of medical devices used in the early 1900s on the RSS Discovery ship.
“The kind of at-home medical devices they were using in 1906 weren’t as primitive as you might think,” Vicky Farquhar explained. “For example, they were able to do an appendectomy on board the RSS Discovery – and the patient survived.”
The event opens at 9am for registration coffee and runs until 3.30pm, with time to visit the exhibition and RRS Discovery from 3.30pm to 5pm.
For more information and to register, book here https://tayhealthtech.org.uk/activity/conference-2025/
Heriot-Watt University has established a Global Research Institute in Health and Care Technologies to turn cutting-edge research into impactful and practical solutions that will have a positive impact on peoples’ lives, on the NHS and on health and care globally.