Health Select Committee told patients suffer due to UK ’s slow adoption of new medical technologies

John Wilkinson, Director General of the Association of British Healthcare Industries (ABHI), today told the Health Select Committee that the UK ’s slow adoption of new technologies means that patients suffer and the NHS loses value.

Speaking after being invited to give oral evidence by the committee, Mr Wilkinson said the benefits in terms of more effective and less invasive treatment for the public were clear. Equally, millions of pounds could potentially be saved through adopting more efficient treatments. Yet despite developing many medical innovations domestically, the British public often does not benefit from them.

Mr Wilkinson said that for patients to get the best treatment and the NHS to get the best value more intelligent procurement was needed and that the purchasing function within the NHS is currently under-resourced and under-skilled.

Specifically, he pointed to a lack of clinical involvement in the buying process; the fact that many products are purchased only if they meet certain limited criteria – even if these are more effective products available; but most importantly, lowest price is predominantly chosen as the most important procurement factor.

If lowest price is prioritised, several consequences occur. These include:

The best technologies for patients do not reach the NHS.   Products that offer huge benefits to patients and efficiency of healthcare delivery will not be available in the UK .

  A barrier to innovation develops.   The industry has little incentive to invest in R&D for new products and devices.   Larger companies will re-locate activities away from the UK , while many SMEs may move out of the market altogether.

Opportunities for partnership with the NHS disintegrate.   Suppliers will not support their products but will simply sell them into the market on an opportunistic basis.

Choice in the NHS will become limited.   Clinicians, and therefore patients, will be restricted in the choices of technology and treatment available to them.

Patient safety could be compromised. Restricting the availability of the very technologies, which can deliver improved performance, would prevent hospitals from being as clean and as safe as they need to be.

In addition, UK industry will not be in a position to respond to NHS requests to design safer technologies.

Mr Wilkinson also said the NHS market itself also prevents the successful use of medical technology.   The budget silos that characterise NHS funding can often lead to inefficient management of the patient pathway.

An example of this is the use of insulin pumps and monitors for diabetes.

While they may initially be more expensive than existing methods - and therefore far less likely to be favoured by procurers - they are far more effective both for diabetics and for the NHS in terms of cost effectiveness.   Their use means fewer patients present with hypoglycaemic episodes at A&E and many avoid serious long-term issues, such as amputations or even blindness.

The NICE guidelines for diabetes clearly state that pumps and monitors should be the first choice treatment but few have been purchased by the NHS.

Mr Wilkinson, who acted as secretariat for the industry side on the Healthcare Industries Task Force (HITF), pointed to HITF’s key outputs as a major step forward in encouraging both innovation of and faster adoption of the best treatments for British patients.

In written evidence submitted to the committee prior the hearing, the ABHI gave an example of a British innovation that allows patients to make a faster recovery and return home much earlier and save the NHS money that was launched in Germany because Britain failed to take it up first time.

An independent NHS report found that ABHI member Deltex Medical’s ‘CardioQ’:

  “improves efficiency and saves the Trust a considerable amount of money. We are able to treat more patients because they stay in hospital for shorter times. The saving of about £1 million a year is the equivalent of the running costs of a ward for a year”.
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 John Wilkinson, Director General of the ABHI, said:

“ Britain is a world leader in spearheading the development of new medical technologies but traditionally extremely slow at actually adopting them ourselves.    We need to speed up passage from laboratory to patient bedside. The way to do this is through more intelligent buying from the NHS, which takes into account the volume across entire patient pathway rather than just initial purchase price.

“As well as involving less-invasive treatments, more advanced medical technologies mean a patient is discharged quicker, which massively reduced costs when taking into account clinicians professional hours, bed space. Also, because they are able to go back to work sooner, the economy isn’t hit so hard.

Notes

• The Association of British Healthcare Industries (ABHI) is the lead trade association for the medical devices and systems industry (manufacturers of medical devices, equipment and consumables and other suppliers to the medical community. www.abhi.org.uk
  
• The role of the Association is to advance medical technologies and provide a forum for policy discussion with the industry's customers, legislators, public bodies and interested groups.

• To get an independent comment on health issues from the ABHI Director General John Wilkinson, please contact PR Manager Rory Carroll on 020 7787 3067.

(5/3/05)