Driving Better Health: How NHS-Industry Partnerships Are Transforming Patient Care 14 Oct 2024

A new report from the ABPI, Partnering for Progress: A Data-Driven Analysis of NHS-Industry Partnerships, concludes that NHS-industry partnerships are making a clear and measurable impact on health outcomes. These partnerships are improving patient care and helping the NHS use resources more efficiently across the UK.

The report shows that these collaborations align perfectly with NHS priorities, improving health outcomes while ensuring treatments are both affordable and consistent with NICE (National Institute for Health and Care Excellence) guidelines.

 Key Findings

NHS trusts that partner with the industry are significantly more likely to prescribe cost-effective, NICE-recommended treatments, resulting in better patient outcomes.

• Secondary Care: Trusts working with the industry are 59% more effective at prescribing lipid-lowering therapies for high cholesterol, leading to improved cholesterol control. Additionally, these partnerships show a 30% stronger association with prescribing blood glucose-lowering therapies for frail patients with type 2 diabetes, improving blood sugar management.
• Primary Care: Partnerships have driven a 28% improvement in cardiovascular disease management compared to non-partnering networks.
• System-Wide Benefits: These collaborations bring broader advantages too. For example, a partnership in Wales reduced diagnostic wait times for head and neck cancer patients by 32%, speeding up access to critical care.

 Recommendations for Future Success

The report outlines five key recommendations to build on these achievements:

Secondary Care

• Conduct more in-depth research to fully understand how these partnerships directly affect patient outcomes and NHS efficiency.

Primary Care

• Scale up partnerships to address unwarranted variations in prescribing and improve chronic disease management.
• Use collaborations to identify at-risk patients, accelerate diagnosis, and reduce health inequalities, ultimately delivering better health outcomes.

System/Place Level

• Track and scale up the most successful projects.

National Level

• Utilise tools like the Innovation Scorecard to identify areas where prescriptions don’t align with NICE guidelines and take steps to close these gaps.

Conclusions

The report confirms that NHS-industry partnerships are driving measurable improvements in health outcomes.

In acute trusts, these collaborations have led to a 59% improvement in lipid-lowering therapy prescriptions for high cholesterol and a 30% improvement in blood glucose control for frail diabetes patients—both of which are in line with NICE guidelines.

In primary care, partnerships have produced a 28% boost in managing cardiovascular disease, underscoring the real-world benefits of NHS and industry working together.

On a system-wide scale, these partnerships are improving case finding, enhancing prescribing efficiency, and reducing health inequalities across the UK.

The five recommendations in the report provide a clear roadmap for scaling these partnerships to improve patient care even further across all four nations.

Want more details? You can read the full report here.

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