Our Managing Director, Araminta Ledger, addresses the East of England All Party Parliamentary Group

Hello. My name is Minty Ledger – and I work for an organisation called Cambridge University Health Partners.

Those partners are the biggest hospital trusts and universities in our part of the region. So, I am here representing Cambridge University and Anglia Ruskin University plus Cambridge University Hospitals Trust, who run Addenbrooke’s and the Rosie, Royal Papworth Hospital which is the UK’s transplant centre and Cambridgeshire and Peterborough NHS Trust which runs mental health services.

I also work closely with, amongst many others AstraZeneca, GSK, Illumina, CMR medical robotics, Cancer Research UK, and the MRC Lab of Molecular Biology which has 12 Nobel prizes and invented the technology that is used to make 1 in 3 new drugs around the world today.

Collectively, we have decades of experience in healthcare and life sciences and we understand the role that life sciences’ innovation simply has to play in creating the modern NHS described in the government’s recent 10 year plan.  

I am not here to tell you that the NHS is a problem to be solved – I am here to tell you that with the right changes, the NHS can be critical part of the solution – and that your region has the talent and expertise to lead not just the UK but the world in developing the innovations that can and will turn things around – we can’t do it alone though, we need the help of our politicians.

Because our Achilles heel in the UK is the time it takes us to adopt and scale up new innovations.

And only politicians can drive the changes we need to speed things up. Let me explain how.

First, the short-term. Please adopt the ideas in two recent reports for government.

Last year the Chief Executive of Addenbrooke’s hospital, Roland Sinker wrote the Innovation Ecosystem Programme – it is a detailed roadmap for how to make the NHS a much better place to innovate.

Some ideas will cost money, but others would be simple and free. Like making innovation a measured KPI for every hospital – rewarding them for trialling new ideas.

We are now trialling Innovation Landing Zones in our city’s hospitals – places were any member of staff with any idea to improve productivity or healthcare, can be shown how to make it a reality.

The second report we would like implemented was written by our chair, Lord James O’Shaughnessy, and it outlines how the UK can regain its place as a global centre for commercial clinical trials.

In recent years James found that we have lost out on nearly a billion pounds worth of trial business.

We must make the NHS an easier place for industry to test its products. On average a clinical trial participant puts £9,000 back into the NHS and saves an additional £6,000 in treatment costs.

As politicians, we ask you to champion the implementation of both these reports.

We would also ask that you champion two things we know can make both constituents and NHS staff nervous – yet we know through experience will be critical to achieving the 3 NHS shifts. Analogue to Digital. Hospital to Community. Reactive to Preventative.

Those two things are industry collaboration – and the sharing of public health data.

Talking of data, it is the fuel that makes AI work.

It’s as simple as this. No data sharing. No AI.

Don’t let online amateurs scare people offer. Help us make the fact-based case to the public, to government and NHS staff that both working with industry and sharing data are not just positive but essential.

Now the long term.

The government has just outlined how millions of patients will be treated closer to home in neighbourhood health hubs, by moving services out of hospitals.

Cambridge has three new hospital programmes – one a regional hospital for children, one for cancer and the latest for new regional acute services including A and E.

Please don’t think that these two goals are incompatible – the reverse is true.

Our hospitals are uniquely designed to do exactly what government wants – to create and roll out the innovations that will allow far more people across the region to be diagnosed, monitored and treated either close to their own home, or in it.

They aren’t ordinary hospitals – they are set-up as innovation factories – where the best minds from industry, academia and the NHS will work side-by-side to invent cutting edge new treatments in cancer, mental health issues, heart and lung problems – all the key areas costing our economy multiple billions a year and keeping people out of work.

The cancer hospital, for example, will have AstraZeneca researchers working side-by-side with NHS doctors and Cambridge University academics from 3 different research institutes – one of those institutes is already leading the world in spotting cancer early, when you have a much better chance of recovery.

Another will be dedicated to using your DNA to tailor your treatment.

Cambridge is leading the world in this field.

Breast cancer patients are now offered a full DNA scan at the start – it has meant that around 4 in 10 patients were spared months of extra chemotherapy or radiotherapy that they didn’t need – or that they avoided drugs that would have given them horrible side effects.

We are now applying this technique to brain cancers – and scanning the DNA of newborn babies to look for rare diseases.

The new hospitals are designed to be small, with fewer beds and we are already running remote diagnostic centres across the whole region – in Ely and Wisbech – with more to come.

They are not old-fashioned buildings full of beds for sick people. They are the essential ideas-factories we need to make new discoveries, demonstrate that they work and then deliver them at scale to the region, country and world.

So as politicians, please back the Cambridge hospital programmes. They are not the past, they are the future and they will benefit patients across the whole region.

Please make the case for sharing health data and working with industry. Please see innovation not as a nice to have, but as a must have.