NHS’s MedTech Strategy: Building Resilience, Innovation, Infrastructure, and Focused Markets for UK’s Future in Medical Technology

The Med-Tech Innovation Expo in June presented the NHS’s medtech strategy. The NHS released this strategy in February 2023 and offers a comprehensive vision of the future of medtech in the UK, focusing on four key areas:

• • Resilience and continuity of supply
  • Creative innovation
  • Dynamic markets
  • Enabling infrastructure, and specific market focus

• “Resilience and continuity of supply” highlights the importance of open dialogue and sustainability between government, industry, and NHS following lessons learned from the COVID-19 pandemic and the challenges brought about by Brexit. This focus also emphasizes support for the NHS’s net-zero goals.
• “Creating innovative and dynamic markets” acknowledges the existence of numerous programs supporting innovation and funding but says these can be difficult to navigate, so pledges a more unified approach, details of which are yet to be published.
• “Enabling infrastructure” focuses on the product’s utility, who will use it, accessibility, and necessity. It encourages suppliers to collaborate with the NHS on aspects such as understanding demand, fostering innovation in areas of significant need, and strategizing how stakeholders will procure innovations.
• “Specific market focuses” examines parts of the medtech industry where NHS needs collaboration, especially diagnostics, to tackle the current backlog. It also aims to ensure the adoption of genuine innovation in commodity medtech and provide clinicians and patients access to unbiased resources for product comparison and selection.

The medtech vision revolves around securing the right product (safe, effective, innovative, sustainable) at the right price (value for money, outcomes-focused, supported by quality data) in the right place (accessibility, adoption, resilience). An overall goal drives this vision to improve patient care and the industry. Furthermore, details on its implementation are still to come. Meanwhile, Wilmington Healthcare supports medtech, aiming to align with these goals.

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