My Lords, I support Amendment 60 in the name of my noble friend Lady Thornton on the need for ICBs to share innovations and good practice widely, in the spirit of collaboration. The NHS has for many years been rather poor at sharing and adopting innovations compared with, for example, local government, where several effective networks exist for the sharing of good practice and there is a real culture of such sharing.
The Science and Technology Committee, under the chairmanship of the noble Lord, Lord Patel, reporting on its inquiry into the life sciences, found that the NHS ought to be a unique opportunity for the spread of innovation across the system—that is what the “N” in NHS is all about—but that it was a long way from realising that aspiration. The evidence from NHS England’s director of innovation was lacklustre in the extreme, and progress from NHS Improvement was slow. The Select Committee report said that the current structure of the NHS “stifles innovation”.
When I was chief executive of Diabetes UK, I discovered how even getting innovations and improvements that would save the NHS substantial money was like pulling teeth. In frustration, I wrote to the then Chancellor—slightly tongue in cheek—to tell him how to save a billion quid by implementing the best practice patient pathways for diabetes patients. I am still waiting for a response.
In an effort to see how other countries’ health systems handled improvement and innovation in diabetes care, I went to Canada and the USA, and came to the conclusion that collaborative health systems such as Canada’s were better at sharing and then adopting improvement and innovation than competitive ones like the United States. My noble friend Lady Thornton’s amendment is highly necessary and sets the tone for a collaborative rather than a competitive approach, which should be at the heart of the NHS for the future.