The NHS is in crisis. Is innovation the saviour?

According to the report, our much-loved NHS is struggling with deteriorating patient access to life saving medicines and devices, and significant gaps in care quality. It provides an unflinching look at the pressures facing the service, from lengthy waiting times and staffing shortages to the legacy of underinvestment. 

However, radical innovation can drive productivity and healthcare outcomes. The findings highlight the urgent need for structural reforms, renewed investment in community care, and a greater focus on technology to address rising healthcare demands. It discusses how we rapidly need to harness digital tools and innovation to modernise care delivery and improve patient outcomes. 

Through projects at CPI, we’ve previously identified similar obstacles, particularly around the need for coordinated efforts to support the development and commercialisation of healthcare technologies.

The UK’s HealthTech innovation ecosystem has its own challenges that are hampering the flow of innovation into the NHS. Although the UK excels at research, translation remains a huge barrier and companies in the UK struggle with securing the funding to grow and to have their technology adopted by the NHS. 

At CPI, we’re playing a pivotal role in supporting companies to develop and scale their technologies. We enable them to leverage the skills and knowledge of over 700 experts and the capabilities of £200 million in innovation assets, which ​‘catapult’ ideas towards adoption more rapidly. 

We also engage in large-scale public-private partnerships designed to convene innovation ecosystems, enable collaboration for significant mutual benefit, and drive industrial change. These initiatives have outcomes that can radically improve population health and patient care and can be truly transformative for the NHS. 

Can we innovate the NHS out of its current crisis? I think we must! 

Technology and location of care – what does the Darzi report suggest?

1. Technology: The report highlights that, while the NHS has made some progress with technological advancements, such as virtual wards and remote consultations, it remains significantly behind in fully realising the benefits of digital transformation. 

The past decade has seen missed opportunities to adopt technologies that could’ve shifted care from a ​‘diagnose and treat’ model to one focused on ​‘predict and prevent.’ It stresses the urgent need for increased investment in technology, particularly for community services, and calls for harnessing the potential of the NHS’s extensive data and emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. 

2. Moving care away from hospitals into the community: The report advocates for a strategic shift of resources towards community-based care, including primary, mental health, and community services. This ​‘left shift’ has been a long-standing goal to make care more accessible and better integrated for people with long-term conditions. 

However, despite policies supporting this move, the report notes that spending on hospitals has increased, reversing this intention. A key recommendation is to rebalance resources, build digital infrastructure, and ensure the right professionals and diagnostics are available in the community to make this shift effective. 

3. Innovation: The report underlines the crucial role of innovation in ensuring the NHS’s future sustainability. While recognising the importance of partnerships within the life sciences sector, it notes that innovation has often been deprioritised amidst other pressing challenges. In the medium term, fostering innovation, particularly through new care models, multidisciplinary teams, and digital health solutions, will be essential for addressing current inefficiencies in the NHS and improving the quality of care. 

The report also highlights the disturbing state of cancer diagnosis and survival rates under the NHS and comments on how, as a UK society, we need to improve public health as well as health inequalities. Technology and innovation have a significant role to play here. 

How can we innovate to improve patient care and outcomes?

I’ve worked at CPI now for 10 years, and in that time, I have personally been influencing the business to focus on innovations within the HealthTech sector. I have a family member who is partially sighted, and I’ve worked closely with the charity Fight for Sight as a volunteer. Through this, I’ve seen how research, innovation and medical technologies can really help those who need it. 

Enabling life-changing health technologies to get to market also aligns perfectly with our vision to enable a healthier and more sustainable future for people, places and our planet through leading capabilities in science and technology innovation. 

Throughout my time at CPI, we’ve supported innovators working in remote monitoring, in vitro diagnostics (IVD), wearable devices that support a healthier lifestyle, and even neurotechnology-based home therapy, including: 

KnitRegen – making smart stroke therapy more portable 

We worked with KnitRegen to develop its wearable stroke rehabilitation prototype. We helped make the technology portable, reducing it from the size of a backpack to a wristband. We also made it safer and more energy efficient by reducing the power needed to stimulate muscles. Innovations such as this can help to move rehabilitation from the clinic into the home. 

Ventus Medical – developing a nicotine replacement therapy 

Ventus Medical worked with CPI to tackle a major public health issue by developing safe, effective tools for policymakers to reduce morbidity and mortality. We helped Ventus Medical design a replaceable single-use cartridge that delivers precise nicotine dosages to adult smokers, eliminating toxicant exposure, reducing cravings, and alleviating nicotine withdrawal symptoms. 

Quality Hospital Solutions – supporting midwives with critical temperature monitoring for newborn and premature babies 

Accurate temperature monitoring of newborn babies can help to save lives and prevent critical injury from having long term impacts on young lives as they grow. CPI supported Quality Hospital Solutions to develop a novel and easy to use continuous temperature monitor for newborn babies that overcomes the shortcoming of existing approaches. This is predicted to afford significant benefits on the clinical outcomes of premature births. 

Accelerating technologies for earlier, more precise detection of cancer

We’re also in the process of bringing major global diagnostics companies together with UK-based public sector and NHS stakeholders to revolutionise the development and scale-up of new cancer diagnostics. 

One of the key statements in the Darzi report was that the UK has higher cancer mortality rates than other countries. However, the UK is also the first country to bring genomics into routine care, with successful initiatives such as the 100,000 Genomes project. There’s also been recent successes within screening programmes, such as those for lung cancer.

We’re aiming to leverage the UK’s cutting-edge innovations in this area through a CPI-led ​‘Grand Challenge’ consortium that will accelerate technology developments within cancer diagnostics to enable earlier and more precise detection. 

This will be approached in three distinct parts: 

1. Developing platforms that standardise and increase the efficiency of capturing circulating tumour DNA (ctDNA).
2. Addressing the preparation of protein samples for analysis, to enable a new generation of tests to reach the clinic. 
3. Bringing multi-omics – an exciting technique capable of providing a holistic view of a cancer’s biology – closer to clinical use by defining best practices, standards, reporting methodologies and specifications. 

Let’s save our NHS

At CPI, we agree with the findings and conclusions of the Darzi report and believe that we have a critical part to play in improving health and care in the UK. We will work tirelessly to innovate and scale technologies through technical solutions, regulatory support, product development, and multi-partner collaborations, to improve the lives of patients and the public in the UK and beyond. 

And for me, I will continue to work with the innovation ecosystem to understand their needs and challenges. I commit to helping to get the ecosystem’s messages in front of wider audiences, including government, to enable innovation. 

Let’s get the NHS back to the amazing place it was when I was a little boy, running through a hospital ward carrying flowers for my mother who had just given birth to my little brother. Apparently, I was running so fast that none of the flower heads were still on their stalks when I gave them to her.