The Future Hospital in Global Health Systems: The Future Hospital Within the Healthcare System.

Future hospitals must be able to adapt in many ways to the changing demands on their roles and functions within evolving healthcare delivery infrastructures. These include changing population structures and needs, new models of healthcare provision, technological advances, and innovations in design, all while enhancing their environmental sustainability. This article sets out the issues that those determining healthcare policy and designing future hospitals must consider if they are to become and remain fit for purpose within the wider health and social care system.

The Future Hospital in Global Health Systems: The Future Hospital as an Entity.

Health care is changing rapidly. Hospitals are, and will remain, an essential setting to deliver it. We discuss how to maximise the benefits of hospitals in the future in different geographic and health system settings, highlighting a series of cross-cutting issues.

Toward Analysis at the Point of Need: A Digital Microfluidic Approach to Processing Multi-Source Sexual Assault Samples.

Forensic case samples collected in sexual assaults typically contain DNA from multiple sources, which complicates short-tandem repeat (STR) profiling. These samples are typically sent to a laboratory to separate the DNA from sperm and non-sperm sources prior to analysis. Here, the automation and miniaturization of these steps using digital microfluidics (DMF) is reported, which may eventually enable processing sexual assault samples outside of the laboratory, at the point of need.

Short of capacity? Why the government must address the capacity constraints in the English National Health Service.

A decade of low investment in the English National Health Service (NHS) resulted in strong headline productivity growth but undermined the health system's resilience and left it exposed during the COVID-19 pandemic. Projected demographic pressures, driven by the aging of the baby-boom generation and the rise in multi-morbidity levels in the population, will add pressures to already stretched health care resources. As the NHS faces the twin challenges of recovering services after the pandemic and meeting care needs from an aging population, our projections of demand for care indicate the NHS almost certainly needs significantly more beds as well as more staff.