Academic Health Science Centres

Lord Darzi of Denham Excerpts

Tuesday 2nd July 2019 Grand Committee

[Lord Darzi of Denham (Lab)]

My Lords, I also thank the noble Lord, Lord Butler of Brockwell, for calling this debate on the future policy of academic health science centres. I declare an interest: I chair the Accelerated Access Collaborative, I am a non-executive director of NHS Improvement, and I am professor of surgery at Imperial College London.

As some in this House may recall, in 2007 I led a review of London’s healthcare—A Framework for Action —which recommended the creation of a number of AHSCs in the capital. That created significant noise nationally. Subsequently, in 2008 we published the NHS next-stage review, called High Quality Care For All, and the Department of Health, under the auspices of the NIHR, commissioned five academic health science centres nationally.

AHSCs are organisations that hold a joint and equal responsibility for the delivery of healthcare, education and research. The combination of scientific method and clinical care has been seen as the fastest means of ensuring that scientific advances are translated into improvements in patient care. The establishment of the AHSCs in the UK was through a competitive process, as we heard earlier, judged by an international panel, and represented an attempt to regain this lost momentum. With no additional funding, the universities and their NHS partners in these five centres pledged to combine strategy, operations, and in some cases finance to deliver innovations in teaching, research and service delivery. Over the last decade, as we have heard, the AHSCs, with their BRCs, have made a significant contribution to translational research. Translation has typically either meant “bench to bedside”, meaning basic science to first in human use, or “knowledge translation”, meaning uptake of new innovations. This brings me to the Accelerated Access Collaborative and its role in the NHS innovation landscape.

The AAC is a convening board bringing together NHS commissioners and providers, NHS arm’s-length bodies, industry, patient organisations and Government to ensure that the innovation landscape builds a strong pipeline of proven innovations that meets the service needs and to increase the adoption and diffusion of such across the NHS. The remit of the AAC has recently been expanded by the announcement of the noble Baroness, Lady Blackwood, to include six priorities: implementing a system to identify the best new innovations; setting up a single point of call for innovators, so they can understand the system and where to go for support; signalling the needs of clinicians and patients, so innovators know which problems they need to solve; establishing a globally leading testing infrastructure, so innovators can generate the evidence they need to get their products into the NHS; and overseeing a health innovation funding strategy that ensures that public money is focused on the areas of greatest impact for the NHS and our patients.

In light of all this, I see the AHSCs as having a unique and distinct contribution to make to the innovation ecosystem and the priorities of the AAC by providing a pragmatic testing environment, enhancing the uptake of innovation through their expertise in research methods, access to data and our great NHS clinicians.

The Accelerated Access Collaborative will work with the department of health over the next month to define further the role the AHSCs and their future designation.