Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps (a) his Department and (b) NHS England are taking to support the use of (a) medical devices and (b) diagnostic tools after piloting; and what funding his Department provides for such tools and devices.

The Department and NHS England provide support to innovators and systems across the innovation lifecycle, from ideation and design, through to adoption and scaling. A number of policies and programmes are targeted at the adoption of medical devices and diagnostic tools after piloting.

In February 2023, the Department published its first ever strategy for MedTech, as well as the One Year On Report in April 2024, outlining our priorities for improving the adoption and spread of safe, effective, and innovative medical technologies across the National Health Service.

To help innovators ‘find the front door’ of the NHS, the NHS Innovation Service supports the creation of an Innovation Record and enables support from at least one of 25 organisations, including the National Institute for Clinical Excellence (NICE), the Medicines Healthcare Products Regulatory Authority, the National Institute of Health Research, the Health Innovation Network, and the NHS Supply Chain, which provide support across research and testing, to adoption and spread. To date, this service has supported 870 innovations.

There are several programmes which directly support early-stage innovators and innovations in designing, developing, and scaling their innovations. The Clinical Entrepreneur Programme is the world's largest entrepreneurial workforce development programme. The NHS Innovation Accelerator provides innovators with support and mentorship to enable adoption of high impact products with demonstrable clinical benefit. The Small Business Research Initiative Healthcare funds the acceleration of innovations to tackle unmet health and care needs. The Innovative Device Access Pathway, with system partners, is supporting eight transformative technologies by providing regulatory and access requirements in route to market. Furthermore, NHS InSites supports the NHS to develop its innovation capability infrastructure.

To support later stage innovations with scale and adoption, there are two programmes that have been in place. The MedTech Funding Mandate aims to accelerate equitable patient access to selected NICE recommended technologies, with 12 technologies accelerated to date. Commissioners are mandated to fund these technologies from existing allocations. Additionally, the Health Tech Adoption and Accelerator Fund, investing approximately £28 million to integrated care boards in 2022/23, supports the procurement and implementation of 81 different technologies, mostly supporting virtual wards, at home management, and elective recovery. Spending decisions for use and expansion of new technology is subject to regular review as part of usual financial planning processes.

The adoption of innovative products across the NHS is supported by the Innovation Dynamic Purchasing System, aiming to reduce barriers to entry for small to medium size enterprises bringing innovation into the NHS.

Looking forward, a consultation on a proposed integrated rules-based pathway was launched by NHS England and the NICE in May 2024, which laid out the creation of a predictable, consistent pathway to access and adoption of medical technology. This would also support technology that had already been piloted to scale in the system. The consultation closed in September 2024 and responses are currently being reviewed.