Where Are All The NHS Tech Nerds? - with Kevin Monk of SARD-JV
•February 6, 2026
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Why It Matters
Without a critical mass of tech‑savvy staff and standardized data frameworks, the NHS cannot fully leverage AI or digital tools, limiting efficiency gains and patient‑centered care.
Key Takeaways
- •NHS lacks tech‑savvy “nerds” to modernize its workflows
- •Manual job planning relies on Excel, causing inefficiency
- •Absence of ontology hampers AI and data analytics
- •NHS hack days reveal few technical staff and low status
- •Private platforms demonstrate rapid, patient‑centric digital health solutions
Summary
In this episode of Everything Digital Health, host Marcus Bore sits down with Kevin Monk, CEO of SARD‑JV—a joint venture between his software firm and an NHS trust—to discuss the chronic shortage of technically skilled staff within the National Health Service. Monk describes his company’s focus on automating workforce‑heavy tasks such as job planning, appraisal and rostering, which many clinicians still perform manually in Excel or Word, turning essential processes into bureaucratic after‑thoughts.
The conversation highlights several systemic pain points: the current job‑planning system is treated as a compliance exercise rather than a tool for improving care; there is no unified ontology to classify clinical activities, which blocks AI‑driven analytics and hampers capacity‑demand modeling; and the “shift‑left” agenda—moving services out of costly acute settings—requires robust data structures that the NHS presently lacks. Monk also points to the high churn rate among clinicians, citing a bright therapist who left for academia after the planning burden contributed to burnout.
Concrete examples illustrate what is possible when tech talent is present. Monk praises a private tele‑psychiatry service that leveraged video consultations, centralized data aggregation, and a prescribing nurse workflow to deliver rapid ADHD assessments—something the NHS struggled to provide due to rigid triage and limited digital infrastructure. He also notes that NHS hack days attract a handful of enthusiastic developers, but broader cultural barriers keep technical staff from attending conferences or contributing open‑source tools, reinforcing the perception that tech expertise is low‑status within the organization.
The takeaway for policymakers and health leaders is clear: attracting and retaining technology‑focused professionals, establishing a common activity ontology, and fostering a culture that values digital innovation are essential to modernize NHS operations, improve patient outcomes, and contain costs in an increasingly data‑driven health ecosystem.
Original Description
This week I’m chatting with Kevin Monk, CEO of SARD-JV, a company with 12 years experience selling their Job Planning platform into the NHS, and developing tech solutions around the NHS. We cover a whole range of things including ‘Log In With NHSmail’, outsourcing, insourcing, the nerd deficit of the NHS, the tech leadership deficit of the NHS, I go off on a short Trotskyist rant and we debate small and large companies and how they might treat the NHS - and much more.
To warn any viewers who would be offended, this episode contains a bit of swearing in a few places.
Kevin Monk LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevin-monk-b0b9201ba/?originalSubdomain=uk
Highly recommend listening to some of SARD-JV’s podcast episodes https://sardjv.co.uk/resources/Podcasts/
NHS GEEK PLACES
NHS Pycom https://github.com/nhs-pycom - looks like they have merged with the NHS-R community and their Slack is here
AnalystX https://analystx.uk/
MORE LINKS
Digital Health Summer School https://digitalhealthsummerschools.com/
Kevin’s blog on ‘Log In With NHSmail’ - really low hanging fruit in the NHS tech stack - ready to be more widely used but inexplicably very minimally used: https://kevinmonk.substack.com/p/72c84702-3133-4c94-924c-d54d40263f20?postPreview=paid&updated=2025-11-23T13%3A10%3A51.350Z&audience=everyone&free_preview=false&freemail=true
Kevin mentions this book - The Entrepreneurial Myth: A manifesto for real business https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50634653-the-entrepreneurial-myth
Kevin mentions this great YouTube series by Andrej Karpathy "
The spelled-out intro to neural networks and backpropagation: building micrograd" which is a good introduction to how AI works https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VMj-3S1tku0
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