The barriers to maximising London’s life sciences sector potential

For the life sciences sector to deliver all its potential positive impact to Londoners, it is critical that it interfaces effectively with how care in London is commissioned and delivered; actors across the sector and the thousands of bodies which make up “the NHS” in our city must become strategically and operationally joined up.

Work to improve how the life sciences sector and the NHS work together is already underway; it is one of the key themes of the government’s national Life Sciences Sector Plan, which this strategy is intended to build upon for our region.

However, London also brings its own nuanced challenges to overcome if we are to achieve synergy. The most pressing marker of this is the volume of innovations stuck at the level of localised success; promising innovations consistently find it too difficult to achieve the pan-London or system-level implementations that should transform population health outcomes and generate real economic benefit.

Innovators, investors and healthcare providers often identify three challenges which constrain the ability to scale and deliver truly transformative impact:

• Fragmented, overcomplicated and inflexible financing. The costs and benefits of innovations often span multiple providers or commissioners, making business cases more difficult to establish for financially pressured NHS bodies. The NHS’s traditional approach to financing – using annual budgets – also constrains the ability to plan long-term transformation programmes and limits supplier co-investment. Finally, the lack of funding for “double running” innovations, even when benefits are clearly established, makes large-scale implementation extremely difficult.
• Slow and sub-scale procurement. Procurement tends to be uncoordinated across different elements of the NHS in London, meaning suppliers must grapple with different approaches or requirements across different providers. Matching products to strategic priorities is often difficult at a regional level as demand is not aggregated and organisations prioritise their own organisational objectives, which may often be relatively short term. Alongside this, delays in regulatory approval limit rapid adoption of innovation.
• Localised learning with limited spread. Few pathways exist for London’s NHS to come together to find the best ways of testing innovations or to share the results of pilots. Companies entering London frequently need to build local evidence bases and repeat pilots. Tools for sharing patient-level, system-wide data are also underutilised to inform the spread and adoption of innovation.

These challenges largely result from the complex, decentralised model of NHS care in our capital with patients who access care from many different providers – meaning no single body has overall responsibility for their health.