The new medical technologies directorate: what is it and what does it mean?
Oli Hudson, content director at Wilmington Healthcare, explores the implications of the new government medtech directorate for industry and procurement.
What will happen to medtech procurement in the wake of the pandemic?
COVID has exposed vulnerabilities in government processes and distribution, as well as global supply chains. The most high-profile examples were ventilators and PPE, but other supplies have been in the frame, including consumables, complex capital equipment, a wide variety of diagnostics, and digital health products.
Even as we begin to exit the pandemic, these supply problems will inevitably continue, as reported last month concerning the race to get on top of the acute and elective care backlog - which is highly likely to bring anunprecedented surge of patients and commensurate demand for products.
Additionally, Brexit has thrown up potential supply and distribution problems.
Now HSJ brings news of an upcoming government response to this complex issue, with a DHSC leak revealing the setting up a new medtech directorate.
In a sign that the pandemic has forced the government to take effective medtech procurement more seriously, some of its own staff from the DHSC will form a core leadership grouping in the new body.
We also know from the Queen’s Speech that the government intends to put the life science industries front-and-centre of the post pandemic ‘build back better’ programme – mentioning this in literally the first paragraph of the speech.
It’s therefore encouraging for medtech that the HSJ leak speaks of the pandemic ‘shining a light on the criticality of the medtech sector to the effective functioning of the healthcare system’ – better late than never – and of ‘the opportunity to build an even more thriving medtech sector in the UK.’
There was also an admission that procurement as a whole, especially national procurement, has been on a code-red footing during the past 18 months, and some sustainable, systematised and effective processes were now needed for medical devices.
The new directorate will focus on six main areas: resilient supply chains; value for money; regulation of safe, high-quality products; sustainability; innovation to improve clinical outcomes; and promoting UK interests in global markets.
A DHSC spokeswoman said: “This global pandemic has shown the benefits of bringing together a number of functions in this new directorate in order to improve our technological capabilities to support patients, suppliers and the NHS.”
According to the memo seen by HSJ, there is already a fairly well developed leadership structure, centring around a so-called ‘Gang of Four’.
No permanent director for medtech has been appointed yet, but Chris Stirling, a consultant from Stirling Advisory will become interim director. His recent expertise has been on the procurement of oxygen, ventilators, medical devices and clinical consumables during the pandemic, and was involved in designing the NHS Supply Chain commercial and operational model.
Dr Sara Felix will lead on policy, strategy and regulation and lead the devices regulatory team will be a part of this function, having led the national supply disruption response designed to liaise with suppliers in the run-up to Brexit.
The DHSC head of supply resilience and sustainability David Wathey “will continue to lead on customer relations and supply resilience and sustainability issues”.
And national health strategy director Robert Moorhead “will continue to provide day-to-day leadership for the COVID programme and support the transition of continuing activities to the relevant permanent teams and the wind down of other programme activities.”
What does it all mean? The announcement of the directorate seems to be a move in the right direction, if it provides as it should some badly needed strategic coherence in procurement for the new decade.
If this is also the first blast of the trumpet in a new vogue for supporting the industry at home, and prizing value, outcomes, resilience and sustainability, that’s also welcome. The race-to-the bottom atmosphere the industry has faced in the past could ease into something more promising if the directorate supports ideas of longer-term value and high-quality products and allows new purchasing and regulatory practices that allow adoption at speed and scale.
These moves are also to be seen in the context of integration and population health, with the NHS now prioritising patient safety, trusts aligning themselves to quality improvements in procurement and new techniques under the GIRFT initiative, and the likelihood, under the new integrated provider collaboratives, of joint and aggregate purchasing across systems and places.
There are lots of conditionals here, but if all these things hold true there are certainly opportunities here for industry to move to a better place in terms of relations with the NHS; the unknowns are really whether the finances will hold up to allow this latitude, whether these systems will be geared to supporting UK SMEs as well as big medtech as the Queen’s speech seemed to promise, and whether the rebuilding and resetting of the post pandemic approach will last into the longer-term.
In the meantime, we await the establishment of the new Medtech Directorate with keen interest.