Productivity: How Can British Business Work Smarter?

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Hello and welcome to the programme. Now, given how important productivity is in an economy, we should really discuss it every week on the bottom line. We don't, of course, because there probably isn't enough new to say about it to do that. and often people's attention wanders when the subject comes up. But let us get into it today, because it is a perennial issue for the UK, British productivity weakness, and we should update ourselves on the thinking about that.

And then we also have the buzz around AI, which is perhaps seen as a solution to poor productivity. So we have to discuss an old problem and the new possibilities for rectifying it. Before I introduce my three guests, who think much harder about this than most, let me just make sure we're all clear about what we mean by productivity. Now, you can slice it up in different ways, but the notion we should focus on here...

is the amount of value created per hour of labour worked. It's labour productivity. So here are some ways in which you can make society more productive. Everybody could work harder, get more done each hour. Or two... Workers could be better trained and more skilled and get more done in an hour. Or three, we could give our workers more and better tools to do the job. Or in fact, at the limit, you could automate production using robots or machines.

and you'd have very high labour productivity, as for each hour the workers work, more would get done. Or you could arrange a workplace more efficiently so people are not wasting time. There are other ways to boost productivity too, though. The economy could gravitate towards higher value industries, making pharmaceuticals rather than t-shirts. And then you get more.

value per hour of labour worked. However you do it, raising productivity is how we make ourselves richer. It solves lots of problems, but the UK is less productive than the US, France or Germany. So we're either poorer or we just have to work more hours to keep up.

with our counterparts. So let us talk about productivity. What's going wrong? What can be done to put it right? I have three business leaders with me to discuss what productivity really looks like in practice, from offices and factories to call centres and...

operating theatres. Let us meet them. And first up is Katie Davis, Managing Director of Cap Air Systems, which is an electronics manufacturer based in Can you just give us a three-sentence biography of the company, Katie? OK, so Cap Air Systems has been around for 25 years.

We're what you call a contract electronics manufacturer. So we don't necessarily have our own products, but we will make other people's products for them. So that is making printed circuit boards, PCBs. We make cable assemblies, wiring harnesses, and we'll put all of that together into our customer's end product.

We're on the smaller end of the SME sort of scale. So we have doubled our turnover and doubled our workforce. So we're currently sitting at 20 employees. So we're on a massive growth trajectory. It's my job to make sure that that doesn't end anytime soon. So productivity is...

kind of call to every day. The company is still owned by the founder. He's hitting that point where he maybe doesn't want to be working quite so hard anymore. I came on board just over a year ago. So yeah, I'm part of the succession plan for the company to make sure that it continues.

to employ a good number of people in the Cambridgeshire area, but also continues to grow and adapt and live on forever. But your background was kind of productivity, about getting more out of a workforce, about... business transformation absolutely so when i'm talking about transformation that's kind of the driver kind of implicit driver behind all of it really so i've worked in manufacturing or engineering for probably the last 15 years and a lot of that focus has been on you know people

So are our people engaged? Have they got the skills to be able to do whatever they need to do and get the most out of every hour that they work? Have we got enough people to do all of the work and maximise the throughput through whichever business it is? Also looking at kind of technology which will... we'll come on to and looking at kind of you know even the basics like your layout where is your stuff can your people get to it quickly are they spending their time

building things while they're spending their time looking for instructions. Oh, this is the stuff I want us to talk about because this just drives me mad when you sort of see a system in an operation where you can see that there's a like... A 14 second time waste between this process, which is being repeated 100 times a day. And you're like, guys. Yeah. OK, well, we'll come to all of that. Let's meet my second guest, though, who runs an incredibly different operation, but one where.

Productivity is very important. Louise Stead is chief executive of a group of NHS Foundation Trusts, the Royal Surrey NHS Foundation Trust and Ashford and St Peter's. Trust, you must be the most important person in the healthcare of Surrey, aren't you? I mean, just about, Louise. Maybe the busiest, I'm not sure, the most important. So it's three main hospitals and four community sites. So seven sites. Right.

productivity must be quite important. You're not going to measure it in the way you might in a manufacturing outfit, but... No, well, you're absolutely right. So productivity is obviously affected by the number of patients that walk through your emergency door every day. So you might have X number of operations planned, but if those beds are taken up with patients walking through the door, obviously that affects...

things on a day-to-day basis. Yeah, that's all output though, isn't it? I mean, looking after the emergency patients, looking after the elected patients, it's all output. Do you have huge measuring operations? Is there a software product that is counting your outputs? There is, yes.

So it's called Model Hospital, and it measures everything from the productivity of each business unit. So if you're urology or cardiology, also can measure between different consultants how efficient they are. Really hones in on things like... theatre operating time, so is your stuff in the right place, exactly as Katie said, all of those sort of things. So that with a recent sort of addition, I suppose, over the last few years called Getting It Right First Time.

which is really about making sure we have some sort of process across the NHS that is led by best practice by clinical excellence to make sure that we are doing the best we can for patients. Getting it right first time, along with making sure people aren't wasting their time trying to find the widget they need to put in the circuit board. Getting it right first time and not having to do the whole job again is another fantastic productivity hack, because if you are doing every job twice...

You're half as productive as you would be if you did it right first time. We'll come to all of that. But I need to introduce my third guest, Samir Vyuru, who's the chief AI and product officer at Capita. Capita is a name people may be familiar with. It's very back office. So whose offices are you at the back of? Give us some examples of what you're doing. A lot of our business is with the...

departments of the British government, local councils included. So we, as an example, run what we call the fire service college out in the Cotswolds, where we train firemen and women. and deploy them into the field. We do a lot of frontline assessments, like we recruit for some of the armed forces. But you've got a lot of private sector clients as well. We do. So what kinds of stuff do you do? Who are the clients? So we provide...

primarily front office, as in contact centre solutions in the private sector, for utilities in the UK and Ireland. We provide them for financial institutions. A lot of the retailers use our services for customer handling complaints and all of that. Tell us what you're doing at Capita. I've been in the technology industry for about 30 years. I joined Capita about a year ago and the brief was very simple.

productivity or lack of productivity shows up as wait time. And if I were to boil the gist of my job down, it is how do we reduce the wait time for government services and public services and even private sector? hold times when you call a bank or a utility, because that is the leading indicator of productivity improvement in customer service, in case management. So that is my job. So this is not about capita's productivity. This is about capita's...

Clients' productivity. They're a big consulting firm, lots of public sector clients, we should say. We do touch about 70% of the UK citizens almost every week in some form or the other through one of the services where we provide. So if we were to save a fraction of them time. That is a massive difference. And we'll come to AI because I do want us to spend a bit of time in this conversation talking about AI and you've got AI in your job title. But look, just let's open this up. I want to know...

We've just got to get to the bottom of what is usually the problem in UK productivity. I mean, I in my head have sort of 100 theories as to what it could be. I mean, is it that we're unskilled or uneducated? I don't think so, because we're as well educated as all our counterparts. I mean, we're not badly schooled.

We send lots of people to higher education. What is it? Where are the inefficiencies? And Louise, I want you to start, because you must go around looking at inefficiencies. What are they? Are they just bad systems design or what? I think part of it is a bad systems design, particularly when you look at UK hospitals.

People are operating out of hospitals that were built so long ago that some of the plant, you just couldn't make something really, really efficient work in that way. So our whole infrastructure is not great. OK, so that counts as a sort of capital investment issue. that you haven't built to modern standards. So give me an example of what you mean by that. So, for example, modern operating theatres would mean that you would...

walk patients to theatres. You haven't got to wait on a wall for a porter to come with a bed or a chair and wheel you down. There's a room after the theatre where they can go out at the end and the next patient is waiting to come in. Very few modern theatre complexes have that.

Robotics. So the Royal Sur in Asher St. Peter's big into robotics. You know, that means that patients can go out the next day or the same day for some procedures, which they definitely didn't before. Probably saves us about... two to three thousand bed days a year.

But we need to train people up. We need to make this the sort of gold standard of operating. And that takes time. It takes, you know, every robot's a million pounds. You know, all of those things are the next generation of how operating theatres are going to work. of examples where basically the building and the kit is very important to the efficient working of the hospital. Of course we're not just losing productivity.

for our staff and our hospitals. We're losing productivity for the rest of the nation because when people aren't working... There's productivity lost elsewhere. So for us, the more quickly we can treat people and get them back to their normal lives, that is a double whammy for the productivity argument, isn't it? I think what you're saying comes down to sort of investment.

maybe some investment in training, but a lot of investment in buildings and equipment. Does that ring true to you, Katie, where... There are deficiencies in the UK. Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, when you look at the world of manufacturing, it's had a really interesting journey over the last, say, 20, 30 years. You know, there's been a bit of kind of de-industrialisation in the UK that's sort of, you know, and over the last five years, I guess, with... pandemic, Ukraine, geopolitical...

instability elsewhere, there's a real push for reshoring, which is wonderful because, you know, if you look just at Cambridge in Peterborough, it employs 20% of our residents. So as a sector, it's really, really important. And to me, it's a real key for kind of inclusive economic growth because there are lots of roles at different entry points.

which means that you can get a lot of society into employment, even if it's not where they end up forever. I think when you look at that investment piece, we've had a really barren period as a sector over that kind of last 20, 30 years. I think in terms of physical infrastructure, there's...

challenge you know around availability of kind of small light industrial units and then you know we've expanded so we've not through to our neighboring units so it takes those units out of circulation so that we can cope with our own scale up but then Equally, as we grow, we're in three units not together. It's suboptimal. You know, it's not how you would design it. We're having to move our goods upstairs. It's not...

That's very interesting because there was a big report into UK productivity by a really reputable big economist called Steve Nickel. He wrote it for McKinsey and he was the first one to say the planning laws may be getting in the way of productivity because the fact... are misdesigned the hotels are all old hotels that you know it takes longer to clean the rooms because they're not

purpose-designed rectangular things. He compared hotel cleaning in France and UK. And it comes back to your point, Louise, about the buildings not being adapted to modern...

process management is really interesting yeah yeah yeah very very interesting do we think it's a management issue in the uk we literally are per hour of labor worked about 80% of where the French are. We could basically take Fridays off and be as productive if we were like the French. And that's more or less what the French do. They're the same income as us and they work many, many fewer hours.

Do we blame the bosses? Is it you guys to blame for that? It's not lazy workers, surely. I mean, one nation's workers are just not more lazy than another nation's workers. They're not slackers, our workers. It's not... doesn't bear thinking about that.

So a lot of my modus operandi starts with people. So, you know, talking about the NHS bit, making sure people are included in whatever that future solution is. I was reading a really alarming study the other day. So it's Gallup's state of the global workforce. So the global percentage of people who feel engaged in their work is 21%, which is shocking. And in the UK, it's 10%.

10% feel engaged. 10% feel engaged in their work. And you could imagine that makes a difference to have. Yeah, absolutely. So to me, engagement kind of sits as your bedrock. beneath any of that productivity question because if your people aren't engaged in what they do your quality is not going to be as good because they don't feel as invested in the end outcome I think there's a piece around

Engagement obviously driving people to want to do more. If you're excited about doing something, you will work harder at it and you will contribute to those onward improvements. I think certainly within the manufacturing sector, we've got a massive challenge around...

Culture, it's still quite old-fashioned. But I think engagement, yes, it might be partly management as a contributor, but I think engagement's a really important thing. Well, I put that down to management, though, engagement. I mean, if the workers hate the bosses or... Yeah. They're not interested. If I could build on what she said, let's take a contact center agent and we employ a few thousand of these. You as a consumer, when you call a contact center,

More often than not, these days, you're frustrated that something cannot be solved, that you've been bounced around department to department, that the information isn't available. You had to repeat the same thing a hundred times. But you know who's more frustrated than you? It's the contact center agent themselves because they did not have the right access to information or the empowerment to solve the customer's problem, even though they knew what the problem was and what the solution was.

So giving back that sense of agency to these frontline workers actually has a cascading effect into society because think about how many citizens they touch. One person probably touches a thousand people. And actually, that does make a good point, because again, if the workers are trained and have responsibility and are given the power, you don't need...

as many supervisors for whom to them constantly, they take the call and then they have to just refer it up to somebody else. As a French would say, voila. Two people doing the job. Does that ring true to you, Louise, in health? Yeah, it absolutely does.

You know, there's a phrase that the NHS use a lot, which is working at the top of your licence. And I think, you know, I'm sure everybody here has been in hospital. You've had an operation, for example, where you wait for the consultants to come around and see you in the morning for no reason, other than to say, how are you feeling? You can go home now. So if you took that and made the nurse say, right, if you've met these criteria, the patient can go home.

then you've got to just make sure you've got people just doing the work that only they can do. And I think that is a real sea change for the NHS. In my organisation, there's 10,000 people, you know. You try and get 10,000 people working to the top of the licence, that's a really big ask. Right, so you don't want the surgeon doing stuff that a nurse can do is the basic thing. But actually, when you look at redesigning how things work... It's quite often the people who work...

at any part of that pathway who will have a really good idea. It's quite often porters. It's quite often housekeepers because they see what's happening. And it goes back to what you're saying about empowering staff. Yeah, they absolutely know. And in the right, you know, in the right culture.

I always think of it as removing frictions, like small frictions. Or if I'm doing a bit of work on this with the workforce, it's like, what annoys you in your day? Because if it's annoying or it's... boring it should probably go away to an extent obviously you can't go into everything invent a system but yeah put a bit of emotion behind it you know how can we improve your day you know and it will be those tiny little things that that you've not even noticed give us an example

say receiving stuff from a supplier. So, you know, to a degree we can instruct our suppliers how we want to receive goods. And... Sometimes people just think that we can't change that. Quick phone call to a supplier. When you pack widget A, please could you make sure that you attach that in this orientation, not that orientation, so my team don't have to disassemble it and reassemble it. Saves loads of time.

In terms of that engagement piece and feeling like you're getting value out of your day, my team then received the goods in its condition that, oh, that's good. You can get more done. It's a really positive thing. I want to talk about AI, but let's just summarise where we've got to. We've gone through a lot of factors. Not all seem to be unique to the UK. I mean, engagement is a very important factor, not unique to the UK. Capital, buildings.

Purpose built buildings that are suitable for the activity. And that probably is a bit more unique story for the UK because we do have quite tight planning laws. Systems design. Yeah, management getting the most out of productivity and culture. These are all really important things. I think the investment thing is where the UK has been below other economies and may account for why we just don't.

equip people and automate production as much as some other countries do. So that might be. But let's talk about where it goes. And Samir, I want you to start because AI is in your job title. Many people.

are pinning a lot of hope on AI as something that is going to transform corporate productivity. Is that going to happen? We are seeing the signs of that, Evan. So the focus is not... the whiz-bang gadget that comes out that creates multiple bunnies hopping on Mars or whatever. It is taking the grind out of these day-to-day systems and processes that degrade.

your quality of employment and then translates forward really into society amplified. And so we're focused on taking all of the documentation, the report writing. And all of that, which is, frankly, 30-40% of a day's worth of work away, so that 30-40% of intellectual capacity can then be freed. every technological revolution, there has been intellectual capacity freed. Give me a more specific example of what the AI does that a human would now be doing. So in a public sector assessment,

Let me actually use one portion of that. We have basically been processing invoices so that suppliers can provide services to students. And we used to do 1,000 invoices a week. We are now at 1,000 invoices every 30 minutes. What that means is the SMEs get paid quicker, those who are actually providing services to the students. The students actually get an outcome quicker.

So you see that compounding effect. And that's because the AI is doing what? It is processing invoices faster. It is a very simple task that a human was doing before. And the human is still checking those invoices, but all of the filling the paperwork, printing the invoices, sending those invoices to the right place, making sure that the invoices get paid, making sure that there's enough funds to pay them.

All of that stuff was historically done by a human being logging into multiple different systems and taking away all of that and automating that has resulted in that improvement. And the AI can do that without making too many mistakes. And that's the key term, without making too many mistakes, because there's always going to be human oversight, just checking what's going on. For you, Louise, how much AI...

is involved in your services at the moment? Well, more and more. So if we take cataracts, we do have a system in one of the hospitals whereby if you've had a cataract, you'll be... rung by an AI person called Dora and she will go through a set of questions and at the end of that if everything's fine they'll say that's brilliant you don't need to have a follow-up if the patient says anything that is outside those parameters.

they will say, we will transfer you now to one of my colleagues. So that saves... Generally, elderly populations coming back in to see somebody or even just having a... So that's a conversation, a verbal conversation with the AI. It's really good, yeah. But what when I say something that goes off the script of the AI, does it...

Then it will stop and send you to a real person. The other big area, I suppose, is around looking at things like chest X-rays. So your most basic X-ray that is done... hundreds and hundreds of times every day, particularly in emergency departments.

So those are now read through AI. And what that means is that it can immediately, it looks for the abnormalities, anything that isn't quite there, you can go straight on for a CT scan. But the ones that are... absolutely normal, will be reported so quickly. If you think, if you've ever sat in an ED, the emergency department, with any of your loved ones or yourself, you know, lots of you wait, waiting for results. So 54% of people who spend more than four hours in ED are never admitted.

And what are they waiting for? Generally, they're results of things that have happened. So if you can get something as basic as a chest X-ray done by AI in 30 seconds, that is a massive, massive improvement. And you're doing that already? We are. On the Royal Surrey site, we're doing that. And the cataract, we're doing on the Ashford St. Peter's site. Katie, any AI innovations in your company? So, obviously, we're very small in terms of headcount. There are only three of us.

doing all the buying, running production, running the company, all of that kind of stuff. So from a personal level, there's like an MD of a scaling SME. I want to be able to embrace whatever I can to sort of hack that growth. Because if I'm employing somebody, if I'm bringing somebody new into the business, I want them to be directly involved in making stuff for our customers. I don't want to be adding more overhead.

into my business if I can. So we have been very paper-driven, simple processes, but quite inefficient. Actually, you know, what can I do to run the company better by just using things like ChatGPT to just help me draft policies? write grants, you know, whatever it is. I think if you're an SME, regardless of your sector, if you're an SME in the UK or an entrepreneur, it's an absolute hack for you. It's very interesting because actually...

Katie, you and Samir, you in a way are talking about taking away what one might call white-collar clerical tasks and automating using AI.

I mean, I suppose, do we need to worry that AI is only going to be good for, I mean, that 80, 90% of it is just going to be the white collar? clerical tasks, that it can't get deeper. Because, I mean, here's the question, Katie. In 20 years, can you see AI doing something for the production workers in your company, the ones who are actually making it, as opposed to you and your colleagues trying to run payroll?

role in purchasing. Yeah, absolutely. So I think, you know, again, from an SME standpoint, the cost of robotics, simple robotics is coming down. It's getting far more accessible if you bolt onto that. an AI capability you could then replace those kind of really mundane tasks so if I look at colleagues who are in the welding sector for instance

By adopting robotic welding, they're not necessarily displacing their workers. Those workers just go up the value chain. So then they're doing the complicated welds or they're... doing stress testing or they're checking the work of the robot. So it's not like direct replacement for roles, it's increasing the value of those labour hours. So yeah, in 20 years time, I think we're probably in that sort of position.

We should take it as read, by the way. Lots of people will fear for their jobs and some rightly will fear for their jobs. But broadly speaking, every wave of extra technology, whether it's electricity or cotton spinning machines. Ultimately, we don't seem to run out of work for the population. Samir, do you, I mean, you're very involved in these kind of contact centre type, white collar, front end customer service jobs. Do you see, though,

AI being able to take it much more deeply? Or to what extent is there potential on that? And what's the timescale for that? So it's happening right now. And I'll tell you where it's happening right now and where we're using it. Software development. You've probably seen a lot of the press reports about how software development is getting revolutionized by AI, and it is true. The AI writes the code. The AI writes the code. The humans tested the validator. I'll give you a perfect example.

A client of ours was working on something and the initial estimate from a traditional approach was about six months to get it done. One of our software engineers went in and got it done in a couple of hours and showed them the proof of concept. It was 90% there. It wasn't the...

complete product, but in one hour they had got to 90% and it was just a matter of iterating from there to get to the final product. And that is the level of improvement we're seeing in terms of pace in software development. And once that capacity is freed up, what are you going to invent? I can tell you there's no dearth of ideas from my team. There was a dearth of time.

And now that they have time, they're actually executing on things that they want to do and can experiment with. I mean, I suppose I would see this is going to happen in phases. Essentially, at the beginning, everybody uses ChatGPT to... chat to GPT, then slightly more sophisticated applications come in and more tailored applications like the creation of DORA to talk to cataract patients.

and specific business uses. And phase three, which I think will take longer, is going to be the robot does the welding, the more routine welding that the welder was doing. I guess I'm interested in the timescale of all of this because when the internet came along, there was very similar kind of expectation that everything would transform. And I think it is fair to say ultimately it has transformed everything.

exactly as everybody thought. But I sort of think maybe it took a bit longer than people expected to sort of feed into the productivity statistics. It took a while. So I forgot who said it, but... The statement was that every technology is underestimated in the long term, but overestimated in the short term. And I think that's where we are. We just have to experiment. We have to find out what works, and it will scale. You have to find what scales for you with the new technology.

I think, you know, we talked about underinvestment. So for manufacturing, we've got a massive issue with skills. We've got a real shortage of uptake into engineering, a real shortage coming into the manufacturing sector before we even talk about the diversity issue. I think because of that. rightly or wrongly, a lot of people are looking at things like robotics to be the quick hill.

To solve the labour shortage. That will solve some of that. Yeah, because it is really hard trying to find people with the actual skills. You know, when you look at things like soldering, welding, et cetera, you've got a real cliff edge. And, you know, so at the moment I'm recruiting for people that can solder electronics.

If I'm seeing candidates apply who are younger than 50, that's a real surprise. We just haven't done a lot of that over the last, say, 20-odd years. So I just wonder if that willingness across such a broad range within our sector to invest in robotics... might speed that up a little bit because people just see it as a bit of a panacea, again, rightly or wrongly. I mean, it's interesting for the health sector because all AI has to go, it has to be classed as a medical device.

That is governed by very strict testing. So when you look at some of the... ambient voice technologies that are being trialled so that's if you go to your gp they might have something that listens in the background transcribes what you say and turns it into a note in the gp record but that's

That saves a lot of GP time. Absolutely. And in fact, if you think about every outpatient, so, you know, we have millions and billions of outpatients every year. The trouble is if they condense that and maybe they've...

something has been missed out. That's why it has to be classed as a medical device to make sure that it's not just verbatim putting in. If it goes verbatim, that's fine. But if it's... transcribes it and condenses it then you need to make sure obviously that it's going to be putting the right things in there and of course

The trade-off for being able to use something like ambient voice technology is that what patients like is that the doctor or the nurse looks at them and talks to them because they're not having to make notes. If you talk to my consultants, they'd say... It's recorded my consultation. Now you're asking me at the end of my clinic to go back and check all of that when I could just have written it when I was seeing the patient. So that is extra time for me. That's the problem. AI.

with a person checking it. But it's how do we get that to such a level that people don't feel they've got to go back and check it. Here's my last question, really. I wonder where you think...

AI takes us. I mean, Louise, you start because in a way, I think in your industry, health... is so stretched, you're just like basically to be able to get on top of everything much more successfully and earlier in. But where do you see the benefits of AI manifesting themselves?

So I think particularly radiology. So that's quicker turnaround, I suppose. Quick turnaround and more people to do the things that are really, really highly specialised. I think there's a whole piece that we need to do around. booking appointments and and all of that sort of thing which actually is the sort of thing you do at Capita which the NHS has not embraced in the way it should so anything we can do that makes

the sort of getting into hospital and the getting out as efficient as possible. And then you've got the people with the real physical skills you need in the middle. That's the sweet spot for me. Samir, where do you see the benefits being felt? Better quality outcomes for customers? cheaper, less work? All of those. But where AI excels is it gives us back the gift of time. What would you do with an extra hour a day? What would you do with an extra month in a year?

of productive time. And if history is anything to go by, the human mind is incredibly neuroplastic. We have more ideas than we have time to execute on. I can't predict the future, but some kid somewhere who's got an extra four hours is going to invent the next theory of everything, really. Katie, last word as to where... where you feel the benefits of all of this take us? Yeah, I think from a manufacturing standpoint, obviously cost...

and cost competitiveness is just huge. You know, there's a real conception that you have a bright idea in the UK and then you get it made in the Far East. And I feel that really sharply being on the edge of Cambridge where that's all we hear and people don't realise we actually can make things competitively down the road.

retaining that cost competitiveness is absolutely key making sure that we can actually get the work done for those kind of skills bereft industries and I think yeah the quality piece is getting better value and quality of work for people so I think finding that sweet spot of people working to their absolute kind of skill and and their value it's a really really interesting time i mean we are on the cusp of something and we'll um

see over the next few years where it takes us. But look, let us leave it there. Thank you so much to my guests, Katie Davis from Cap Air Systems, Louise Stead from Royal Surrey and Ashford and St Peter's NHS Trusts, and Samir Vyuru of... Thank you to them. The podcast was produced by Sally Abrahams. It was presented by me, Evan Davis, and is a BBC Longform Audio production for Radio 4.

If you found this interesting, you might want to listen back to another discussion about productivity in France and what we Brits can learn from our French neighbours. That episode was from February 2023. At the BBC, we go further so you see clearer. Through frontline reporting, global stories and local insights, we bring you closer to the world's news as it happens. And it starts with a subscription to bbc.com.

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