20/09/2026
Addenbrooke’s is one of the best hospitals in the world, and after spending time there this week, you really appreciate just how lucky we are to have the NHS on our doorstep.
My wife and I couldn’t be happier after welcoming our little one on Friday. ❤️
The midwives and hospital staff have been absolutely amazing. Watching them keep patients calm, supported and reassured while working through what can only be described as complete chaos is genuinely inspiring. They’re doing an incredible job, often under huge pressure.
But it also got me thinking about the bigger problem.
The challenge isn’t necessarily the people working in the system — it’s managing the numbers.
Hospitals have been dealing with the problem of demand exceeding capacity for hundreds of years. In fact, when the first hospital in Cambridge opened in 1766, there were already rules around managing demand. If you hadn’t been seen by 11am, you could be asked to come back the following week.
Coming from an engineering background, it reminded me of something much closer to home: traffic on a website.
If thousands of people all try to access a website at exactly the same time, eventually the system reaches its capacity. Too much traffic and the service can slow down or even crash.
That’s why we have things like load balancers. Instead of sending everyone to the same server, traffic can be distributed across multiple servers, with users queued when necessary until capacity becomes available.
Cloud infrastructure takes this a step further. If demand suddenly increases, you can spin up additional capacity to handle the load.
The difficult thing with healthcare is that you can’t simply spin up another hospital overnight. You can’t just add another 500 beds with a click of a button.
And, of course, healthcare is far more complicated than moving traffic between servers. A patient can’t simply be sent to whichever hospital has the most spare capacity. Clinical needs, specialist services, staffing, geography and many other factors all have to be considered.
The NHS already does some of this. There are systems that help identify capacity across different providers, patients can sometimes choose alternative hospitals for planned treatment, and there are mechanisms for diverting or transferring patients when services are under pressure.
But it made me wonder whether there is an opportunity to take some of these principles further.
If one hospital is at capacity while another nearby has available capacity, could we make that information more visible and use it to distribute demand more intelligently, where it is clinically appropriate?
Rather than everyone naturally gravitating towards the same hospital simply because it’s their local one, could better information and coordination help balance demand across the wider system?
There are obviously huge differences between moving web traffic and moving people — healthcare is infinitely more complicated — but the underlying problem is surprisingly similar:
Demand is unpredictable, capacity is finite, and when too much demand arrives in one place at once, the whole system comes under pressure.
For me, this week has been a reminder of two things.
Firstly, how incredibly grateful I am to the NHS staff who helped bring our little one into the world. ❤️
And secondly, that some of the biggest challenges in healthcare aren’t necessarily solved by asking people to work harder. Sometimes they’re about designing the system better, using the information and capacity we already have, so that the incredible people within it aren’t constantly having to fight against the load.
We should be incredibly proud of the people doing that work every day.
Thank you Addenbrookes, Rosie Hospital NHS
