Shaping the future of AI in anaesthesia: A clinician-led call to action
Artificial intelligence (AI) dominates headlines and healthcare is no exception. Advocates hail it as a potential lifeline for the NHS under strain. In anaesthesia, perioperative medicine, and pain management, the opportunities appear vast due to a rapid increase in the digitisation of monitors and procedural devices.
Yet for many on the frontline, AI remains more hype than help. Despite rapid growth in the healthcare AI market, adoption in the NHS and other healthcare settings internationally has been slow. At UCLPartners, we’re working to bridge that gap, turning potential into practical solutions that improve care across the system.
Why hasn’t AI changed practice yet?
Multiple barriers hold back progress: complexity in finding and gaining access to large, curated datasets that represent a diverse population, fragmented IT systems, difficult procurement processes and ongoing ethical debates. But a deeper issue lies in how innovation is approached. Too often, AI tools are created by technology companies or research labs, with clinicians and operational staff only brought in as end-users.
This supply-driven model can produce tools that don’t fit real-world workflows. Without strong clinician involvement, innovation risks chasing technical possibilities rather than addressing meaningful clinical problems.
Turning the model on its head
We believe it’s time to flip the innovation process: start with clinical pain points and NHS workflows, then explore if and how AI can help.
That means asking:
- Which problems in anaesthesia need to be solved?
- Which of these could AI address to improve patient safety, efficiency, and we can measure?
- How do we ensure tools fit seamlessly into clinical practice?
- If clinical practice needs to change, how do we do this?
These questions are at the heart of a new project we are launching with the Association of Anaesthetists. Together, we aim to identify the highest-priority challenges in anaesthesia, perioperative medicine, and pain management where AI could make a measurable difference.
This partnership ensures the work reflects clinical insight at scale from anaesthetists across the UK and Ireland, while also drawing on UCLPartners’ expertise in the adoption and spread of innovation across the health and care system.
A new approach: clinician-led demand signalling
The project will run in three stages:
- Open survey – Anaesthetists, perioperative physicians, and pain specialists across the UK and Ireland are invited to share their most pressing clinical problems for AI to address.
- Consensus process – Responses will be prioritised through a structured ranking process, producing a “top 10” list of challenges, informed not only by clinicians but also by patients, other NHS staff, policymakers, and industry partners.
- Roundtables – Stakeholders will then come together to refine proposed AI applications and explore opportunities and barriers.
Why this matters
This process does more than gather ideas. It sends a clear signal to innovators, funders, and policymakers about where innovation should be focused. It ensures that solutions are designed around the realities of practice, not just the ambitions of algorithms.
It also empowers clinicians to see themselves as co-creators of technology. As anaesthetists already work daily with complex digital systems in multiple areas, their insights are vital to ensuring AI tools are useful, safe, and sustainable. This builds on UCLPartners’ wider work exploring the reality of AI adoption in healthcare, as highlighted in our recent report on AI adoption in London healthcare.
Ultimately, this collaborative approach helps focus investment and research where it delivers greatest patient benefit, creating an evidence base that can be shared and scaled across specialties.
A call to action
We are asking anaesthetists, perioperative physicians, and pain specialists across the UK and Ireland to share their ideas for where AI could make the biggest difference.
What slows you down? Where do digital tools fail to meet your needs? Which problems, if solved, would most improve outcomes for patients?
Your input will help reshape the innovation pipeline, so that AI in anaesthesia addresses the challenges that matter most.
Together, we can move beyond the hype, building a future where technology is led by clinical need and delivers meaningful, measurable impact.