Innovation in the NHS

Nadine Dorries Excerpts

Tuesday 3rd March 2020 Westminster Hall

[The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health and Social Care (Ms Nadine Dorries)]

It is a pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Mr Hollobone. I thank my hon. Friend the Member for Bolton West (Chris Green) for bringing the issue to Westminster Hall. I have heard him speak on the matter several times. In fact, hon. Members in the main Chamber yesterday will have heard him make those points and others with the passion that he showed today. As well as passion, he has something that makes us nervous—absolute knowledge and understanding of the subject. That is welcome, and his depth of knowledge on tech and innovation in the NHS makes him a welcome addition to the House.

My hon. Friend mentioned the AI award that has just been announced, the adoption of new products, data and clinical trials. I will make a few points about each of those topics at the end of my speech. As he said, not just the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, but everybody in the Department is passionate about high-tech innovation. Only yesterday, I heard about a new app called Skin Analytics. It has a phone attachment that takes an image of someone’s mole or skin that can be sent through and almost instantly diagnosed as to whether it is skin cancer and requires further treatment. The rate at which AI and technology are accelerating daily is phenomenal.

We can transform the health of millions of patients, improve health outcomes, reduce cost and reinforce the UK’s position as a global hub for life sciences and health tech within the Department, because we are so passionate about it. We can take advantage of those opportunities by seeing what can be achieved by using the technology that is becoming available daily. The UK has a world-leading single player health system, covering 65 million people and—I know that my hon. Friend knows this; I am almost embarrassed saying it—we are the biggest single buyer of medicines in the world. We have some of the world’s best clinical researchers leading universities, charities and life science companies. Indeed, 25 of the world’s 100 most used medicines were developed here, using a public and philanthropic research infrastructure that is, pound for pound, more effective than anywhere else in the world. We should be really proud of that, but we know we must go further.

The NHS long-term plan and the life sciences industrial strategy have set out an ambitious set of actions to create the most collaborative health innovation system in the world—one that gets the best new treatments and technologies from the bench to the bedside faster than ever before. It is beginning to make a difference, first through the Accelerated Access Collaborative, where leaders from across the NHS, patients, charities, industry and the Government are now coming together to tackle the major systemic barriers to the adoption and spread of innovation within the NHS. My hon. Friend is quite right to raise the fact that there have been barriers, but we are tackling the barriers now.

The AAC is supporting greater use of a range of proven innovations, which have the potential to benefit up to 500,000 patients and save the NHS up to £30 million; developing co-ordinated plans to ensure that the NHS is ready for transformative new technologies, such as the advanced therapy medicinal products—ATMPs—and the use of AI technologies in diagnostics and screening; and launching a new medtech funding mandate to drive the best value and most innovative medtech projects across the NHS. With long-term funding for the NHS in place, that collaboration is also now being backed by increased commercial flexibility—flexibility to ensure we can make the best new treatments and technologies available to patients, while ensuring long-term affordability for the NHS.

The impact has already been felt, with Europe’s first access deal for Kymriah and the breakthrough of the CAR-T—chimeric antigen receptor T-cell—therapy, just 10 days after the treatment’s European marketing authorisation, and a pioneering Government collaboration with pharmaceutical company Novartis for the drug Inclisiran to tackle heart disease, which could save up to 30,000 lives over the next decade.

The 15 regional academic health science networks continue to support the local adoption of cutting-edge technologies. More than 3,500 innovations from more than 2,500 companies have benefited from support from the AHSNs in recent years, ranging from new blood tests for pre-eclampsia, which can significantly reduce life-threatening complications in pregnancy, to devices that improve bowel cancer screening.

Finally, we are working to digitally transform the NHS to unlock the technologies for the future. The plans are already being delivered by NHSX. For example, we recently announced a £250 million artificial intelligence lab, which will build and rapidly test cutting-edge prototypes, but the real focus will be on finding and boosting existing technologies and ensuring they can be adopted across the NHS. Over the next three years, the lab will support the £140 million AI Award, led by the AAC, which will be designed to speed up the testing and adoption of the most promising new AI-enabled technologies. It will cover stages of the product cycle from proof of concept, to real-world testing, to initial adoption in the NHS.

By working together across the health system, Government and industry to deliver improvements, we can ensure NHS patients are some of the first in the world to benefit from the best new treatments and technologies. We will ensure that the UK continues to have world-leading life science hubs, where the best innovations get from bench to bedside faster than ever before.

My hon. Friend made a number of specific points. He mentioned AbbVie and its “Bridging the Gap” report. I thank AbbVie for its valuable contribution to the work in this area and I thank my hon. Friend for his support of its report. I know my officials and the Office for Life Sciences have been engaging with the report’s authors, as it has been developed, and they will be closely considering its recommendations. We have made a number of improvements to National Institute for Health and Care Excellence and Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency processes since the data on which the report is based and published, including reforming the cancer drugs fund. I hope we are already beginning to see the benefits of those changes through quicker assessment rates.

I am going to speed up, so that I can get everything in. My hon. Friend mentioned the AI award. We believe the funding mandate and the AI award are a fantastic step forward in driving higher adoption of some of the most exciting new medtech in the NHS, but we know we may need to do more. We will learn from the first year of introduction, and we will continue to review how the schemes can be developed to support a wide range of projects in the future.

In terms of the adoption of new products, we recognise that in some cases new products will require a trust to adapt its care pathways or to train staff, and that is why we provided an additional £2 million a year to the AAC through our pathway transformation fund, to support adoption of the products it has selected for support.

I fully agree with my hon. Friend’s comments on the importance of the UK’s clinical trial system to patients and to our economy. The Government are committed to creating the best environment for clinical trials, both in achieving the ambitions set out in the life sciences industrial strategy and as we agree new future trade agreements. The system is coming together to deliver that. We have streamlined the Health Research Authority approval process to make clinical trial set-up faster. NHS England’s long-term plan sets out an ambition to see a million people registering to participate in health research by 2023-24 and to treble commercial research in the health system over the next 10 years.

The National Institute for Health Research clinical research network has also recently completed a competition to establish five purpose-designed centres, dedicated to last phase commercial research within the NHS’s capacity to deliver research. They will enable significant growth and provide more opportunities for patients to benefit from early access to innovation.

Finally, on making the best use of data for the NHS, which is of particular interest to me at the moment, with regard to the women’s agenda and using datasets within the NHS, we fully agree that the better use of NHS data promises significant benefit for patients, including better ways of predicting and diagnosing illnesses and the development of more effective treatments. We have set up NHSX to drive forward the digital transformation of the NHS and to ensure it can make better use of its data and new technologies. The Government have also invested £37.5 million in the digital innovation hubs programme, which will improve the access to and the quality of NHS data through seven health data research hubs, but it is absolutely essential that we build and maintain public trust in this area. That is why the Office for Life Sciences sponsored a robust piece of public engagement, led by Understanding Patient Data, on the commercial uses of healthcare data.

We are also developing a policy framework, which makes it clear that all commercial uses of healthcare data must have an explicit aim to improve the healthcare and welfare of patients in the UK and address the key concerns of the public, such as robust governance processes and transparency requirements.

I shall end where I began, which is to thank my hon. Friend for bringing his depth of knowledge and expertise in this subject to the debate. As I said, from the Secretary of State to the Ministers involved in the Department of Health and Social Care and officials working there, we all see innovation and technology as a way of improving access for patients, improving patient outcomes, reducing costs and enabling access to better and quicker treatments. Because of that, we are totally supportive of both the innovation and the high-tech agenda. It is debates such as this one, and the subject being raised regularly in the House in the way that my hon. Friend does, that keep pushing that agenda forward.

Question put and agreed to.