40 | Dr Andrew Darby-Smith NHS Anaesthetist and Founder of Upskill.Health 65% of NHS trusts do not meet national maternity safety standards. This has resulted in the highest maternal mortality in 20 years, entrenched maternal inequalities and clinical negligence payouts of over £1bn every year. After repeated national inquiries concluded that scaling on-the-job training for the maternity workforce is essential to improving safety, NHS England mandated a new, on-the-job training curriculum for every NHS midwife in England. However, most NHS trusts can’t deliver it. They say releasing staff for training is too expensive and results in rota gaps that can’t be backfilled. Upskill.Health is solving this urgent problem by combining mobile, AI and VR technologies to deliver bitesize training for NHS staff that fits ‘in the flow’ of clinical work. Through co-design with frontline NHS midwives and women with lived experiences of NHS maternity services, Upskill.Health is demonstrating a new way to deliver cost-effective, impactful training at scale. www.upskill.health LinkedIn: /company/upskill-health LinkedIn: /in/andrewdarbysmith/ Dr Lucrezia Cester CEO and Co-Founder LightHearted AI During her PhD, Lucrezia developed a device at the intersection of photonics and medicine, which has since evolved into LightScope. After two years in the NHS as an AI Clinical Scientist (Topol Digital Fellow and Clinical Entrepreneur), she founded LHAI—raising £2.5 million to date. Heart valve disease (HVD) affects millions and is set to triple by 2060, yet most are diagnosed late, after emergency admission. Women face a 50% higher misdiagnosis rate and are 35% less likely to receive treatment, with even greater disparities in underserved and ethnic minority communities. Current tools like stethoscopes and echocardiograms are slow, operator-dependent, and largely inaccessible outside hospitals. To address this, LightScope is a non-contact device that detects early HVD in 15 seconds. Capturing heart sounds, ECG and blood pressure in one scan, it provides AIpowered diagnosis with over 90% accuracy for severe HVD. Designed for clinicians and non-specialists, it streamlines triage, reduces unnecessary referrals, and narrows the diagnostic gap, currently starting with valve disease, then arrhythmias and hypertension. LinkedIn: /in/lucrezia-cester-phd-6740b7156/ LinkedIn: /company/lightheartedai/
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