We hear from Professor Tara Rampal , Consultant Anaesthetist and Managing Director and Founder of QuestPrehab , a virtual prehabilitation service that prepares patients , mentally and physically , for major surgery or cancer treatment . Rampal tells us about being a HealthTech founder working with the NHS , and how the space can better open itself to entrepreneurs .

I ’ m proud to be part of the NHS

The NHS is one of the largest and most respected institutions in the world – I ’ m proud to be one of its 1.6m employees – with the annual budget for NHS England alone coming in at £ 153bn . Despite what you might read , it ’ s one of the world ’ s top-performing and the most affordable healthcare systems .

However , as a founder of a telehealth SME , I ’ ve come to the view that it needs to be more ‘ entrepreneur friendly ’.

Why I became an entrepreneur

As a consultant anaesthetist , I have a unique insight into what determines a person ’ s outcome after an operation . Having seen patients often not being able to tolerate the most curative treatment – combined with my late mother ’ s 10-year battle against cancer – I became interested in prehabilitation ( prehab ) as a way of getting people as mentally and physically fit as possible in advance of an operation and / or treatment .

Put simply , prehab allows patients to use the time between their diagnosis and treatment to improve their health – and in doing so , they experience quicker recovery times and fewer complications .

I thought long and hard about setting up a start-up . I ’ ve always been passionate about the potential of using digital tools in changing the healthcare landscape and I wanted to do

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