Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what assessment he has made of the regional variation in the uptake of MedTech products across the NHS.

Through the Accelerated Access Review, the NHS Long Term Plan and the second Life Sciences Sector Deal, the Government and the National Health Service have confirmed their commitment that, where appropriate, all patients should be able to benefit from the best treatments as fast as possible. To deliver on this, we have announced a number of measures to improve the spread of health tech innovations:

- Strengthening the Innovation Scorecard, the national tool that measures the uptake of cost effective innovations approved by the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), and widening the range of medtech products it covers;

- From 2020, a new NHS England health tech funding requirement will identify the best value innovations as ‘ready to spread’ and help the NHS to adopt them quickly. This will apply to health tech products assessed as cost saving by NICE. In addition, NICE will significantly increase the number of evaluations it does for health tech products, so that the NHS has the evidence it needs to decide the best products to adopt and spread;

- The Accelerated Access Collaborative, under the chairmanship of Lord Darzi, will be expanded to be the umbrella organisation across the innovation landscape in the United Kingdom, tackling the system wide-barriers that cause unwarranted variation in the level of access for patients;

- The regional network of Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs) will also continue to be a key partner in adoption and spread of health technology. AHSNs bring together the assets in their regions to drive innovation uptake and support local service transformation, promoting health equality, best practice and transformation in leadership, quality and safety of care; and

- These approaches build on NHS Improvement’s Getting It Right First Time and NHS RightCare initiatives, which seek to improve the quality of care within the NHS by reducing unwarranted variation.