Luke Kellaway

Clinician Turned CEO | Follow for more on healthcare, AI, regulation and infrastructure.

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

Finding a centre that accepts paediatric diagnostic referrals is hard enough.

Finding one with the same speed, quality and clinical communication a senior squad gets is harder still.

So academy doctors wait for the NHS or accept a lower standard. Neither is good enough.

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

Paediatric elite sport diagnostics is a very different proposition from adult services.

Academy doctors ask us the same question every week: will you take referrals for our under 18s?

The gap in provision is huge.

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

The best sports medicine teams are multidisciplinary by default.

Nutrition, imaging, S&C, physio, the club doc.

If you only talk to your own profession, you only see a slice of the athlete. #SportsMedicine

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

A diagnostics CEO at an elite sport nutrition conference. Go figure.

Every day is a school day. Learning how weight cutting in combat sports plays out after we have done the pre fight brain MRI, cardiac and bloods was fascinating.

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

Question: in a world of litigation and pointed fingers, who should write the message to the patient or customer when something has gone wrong?

Legal? Customer success? The clinician?

I know my answer.

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

Bad news with good experience lands.

Bad news with bad experience is just bad.

I spend a boring amount of time talking to my team about patient experience, because its impact on outcome is huge.

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

Clinicians deliver life changing news every day in a way that is safe, secure and empathetic.

It is routine. We rarely credit ourselves for it.

Other industries could learn a lot from how the NHS handles a bad day.

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

I got a car recall letter this week: your airbag may explode and fatally wound your passengers.

Called to book. Platform down. "Can I still drive it?" "Yes, just not too much."

Healthcare is far better at delivering scary news than automotive. We should say so more often.

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

Physios and S&C coaches: what is the one piece of kit you could not run a rehab gym without?

Building ours now. Want to get it right. #SportsMedicine

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

Less clinic rooms. More rehab gyms.

I am building the space, load and kit my physios need to get patients to their full rehab potential.

Leaders across MSK: do you have enough resource to deliver rehab properly? Or just enough to say you do?

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

Hot take for physios: a theraband in a clinic room has very few use cases.

The evidence has said rehab over or alongside manual therapy for years.

So why do so few physios have the space, the load and the kit to actually deliver it?

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

MSK accounts for 25% of all GP appointments and a third of all surgery.

It drives sick days and a growing share of benefits claims.

Some call it a silent epidemic. I am sorry, but MSK AI and healthtech are not the answer on their own.

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

Thinking of building healthcare infrastructure? Budget for the test you did not think you needed.

Regs and standards are there for a reason. Radiation exposure was low, but we pulled up a finished floor anyway.

What would you have done?

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

Why share a failure publicly?

Because the days when something goes wrong on site are the days you actually learn.

Anyone who has built healthcare infrastructure has a lead shielding story. Test, retest, then test again.

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

Building a diagnostic centre. This week we found the floor above our new x-ray room needed extra lead shielding.

Finished floor pulled up. Two days lost.

A mistake, yes. Pointy fingers, no. We own it collectively. That is how healthcare infrastructure gets built properly.

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

Elite sport is global. Diagnostic access for travelling athletes is still parochial.

A player can be hurt in Tokyo on Tuesday and scanned in Manchester on Friday.

That is three lost days of decision making. In a season, that matters. @BJSM_BMJ

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

Question for club doctors and physios: what is the strangest place you have had to source a scan for an athlete?

Mine involves a hotel lobby, a borrowed phone and a radiologist three time zones away.

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

Gakpo scanned the day after he went down. Isak and Konsa flown home to be assessed instead.

Two very different clinical pathways for the same problem.

Clubs default to the flight home for a reason. It does not have to be the case.

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

The hardest part of scanning an injured player abroad is not finding a scanner.

It is the club physio in a hotel room at 11pm hunting for a centre that will take a GMC referral, use a UK protocol and get images back to the reporting radiologist at home.

[Luke Kellaway @Lukekellaway]

10 Premier League players came home injured from the international window.

There is a 3T MRI within an hour of every ground they were hurt at. Zagreb, Amsterdam, Belgrade, Tokyo.

Magnets are not scarce. Clinical time and imaging know how are. #SportsMedicine