NHSA: The northern collaboration driving health research

Guestblog from Dr Hakim Yadi on The Northern Health Science Alliance

The Northern Health Science Alliance Ltd (NHSA) is a unique partnership between the eight leading Universities and eight NHS Hospital Trusts in the North of England, along with the four Academic Health Science Networks, encompassing a 15 million patient population. It acts as a single portal in the North of England for research, health science innovation and commercialisation providing benefits for industry, researchers, universities, hospitals and patients.

By integrating the most research intensive universities in the North of England with NHS Trusts across Durham, Lancaster, Leeds, Liverpool, Manchester, Newcastle, Sheffield and York, the NHSA provides the platform to establish an internationally recognised life science and healthcare supra-cluster. The NHSA is committed to driving economic growth across the North by delivering healthcare solutions fit for patients in the 21st Century. The North is well placed to act as a test bed site for the UK, utilising world class scientists, as well as a heterogeneous, real world patient population, to provide solutions to the growing challenges facing our health system.  

Today, data, technology and innovation are driving greater connectivity between citizens and opportunities for growth. The NHSA has made a significant first step in this area by establishing the Government backed the Health North initiative. In the last Budget, the Chancellor of the Exchequer committed £20m to the NHSA to deliver the first phase in this programme of work, Connected Health Cities (CHCs). This has been reinforced in the recent Autumn Spending Review with the Government recognising the vale in the Alliance’s collaborative approach to research. 

This scalable network of CHCs, across the 15m population, will build on existing partnerships, strategic investments and thriving digital and life science sectors, to drive health and care transformation, and ultimately lead to improved and more patient centred care across the region. By analysing integrated information and feeding this back to NHS practitioners, service managers, commissioners, public health professionals, local authority planners, researchers and policy makers, the teams will identify variations in care and needs to best tackle the greatest healthcare challenges. 

The exciting pan-regional development of Health North adds to the recent regional investments which will further support the Northern Powerhouse cluster. A £40m investment in a National Ageing and Vitality Centre at Newcastle University, the new planned £4m Anti-Infective Centre at Alderley Park, the New Medicines Technology Catapult also to be located at Alderley as well as the two regional Precision Medicine Catapult Nodes in Leeds and Manchester and the £235m Sir Henry Royce Institute. 

The UK is one of the most centralised and economically unbalanced countries in Europe. Seven of the eight biggest cities outside London perform below the national average in terms of GDP per person; in Germany, by contrast, the eight largest cities outside Berlin all consistently outperform the national average. The NHSA’s approach is to drive a new health economy in the North by creating the most cost effective place to return value to investors, shareholders and patients. Patients have been patient for far too long and through stronger collaboration we need to ensure that innovative products and services get to them sooner. 

 

Dr Hakim Yadi is Chief Executive of The Northern Health Science Alliance - see their website here.