Life sciences responds to Sunak's Autumn Budget

Life science businesses and bodies have commented on the additional funding the NHS, and life science research and innovation, will receive from the Budget and Spending Review announced by chancellor Rishi Sunak on Wednesday.  

This includes £5.9 billion for NHS England to clear the care backlog and £5 billion for health-related research & development, and an expansion of the new Community Diagnostic Centre Network. 

The £5 billion investment will be split over the next three years, and it will rise to £2 billion per year by 2024, representing a 57% cash increase since before 2030.

BIVDA CEO Doris-Ann Williams said: “The backlog funding package will help the NHS to alleviate the heavy pressure being placed on the service as 5.7 million people await care. BIVDA’s IVD member companies stand ready to play their part in the diagnostic process.

“It is essential that IVD companies of all sizes can access the R&D funding to develop novel diagnostics and bring them to market. The access to funding must be clearly signposted and we are pleased to see testing being brought closer to home in communities. This should reduce hospital visits with the number of centres increasing to achieve nationwide screening. The focus of further funding should be directed towards diagnostic testing in pathology, as well as imaging by radiology.”

£2.1 billion of the funding will be allocated to improving the digital technology and IT infrastructure within the NHS in the hope it can help address the backlog that has built up during the Covid-19 pandemic.

Orlando Agrippa, CEO & founder, RwHealth, said: "Current systems are often outdated, cumbersome, and require specialist knowledge to use them. However, trusts can be reluctant to implement new systems to the perceived financial and training costs of such an investment. Training staff on new data systems can indeed be expensive, so the use of intuitive systems is paramount. The intuitive nature of AI technology and the ability to have it tailored to your needs eliminated this need for extensive training - what could ordinarily take months to get to grips with can now be understood in a matter of hours.

"We are facing vast challenges, battling with your systems should not be one of them. This funding is a perfect opportunity to break away from these old systems and enter the next stage of pandemic recovery with the tools needed to meet the needs of the population.

Tom Bianchi, VP marketing EMEA of open-source company Acquia, welcomed the cash injection for digital services within the NHS, but emphasised it must be used properly.

“All too often in recent years we have seen government pledges of digital transformation in our health service fail to have any meaningful impact on the quality of patient care. An obvious example is with the NHS Track and Trace programme, which the Public Accounts Committee has criticised as being a waste of taxpayers’ money that did not achieve its objectives. However, the success of online vaccination bookings and the Covid pass proves what can be achieved with digitalisation and should be emulated with this new funding.

“For the investment to be successful, it is also critical that initiatives leverage open source to optimise efficiencies and mitigate developer skills shortages. With the country experiencing a severe developer skills crisis, open source will enable the health service to tap into resources from the world’s best developers and accelerate digitalisation strategies, rather than waste precious time and resources coding from scratch.”

The vice-chair and independent community pharmacy contractor of the Pharmaceutical Services Negotiating Committee (PSNC) Bharat Patel added: “While increased health spending is always welcome, today’s Budget has not brought good news for community pharmacy and PSNC remains very concerned that community pharmacy’s bids for further community pharmacy contractual framework (CPCF) funding have been rejected this year by HM Treasury.

Pharmacy businesses of all sizes are coming under increasing pressure – with a range of factors at play including workforce challenges, finances and capacity constraints – and today’s Budget will only add to this squeeze. We are particularly worried about the impact of spiralling business costs, such as the rise in National Minimum Wage, on pharmacies: unlike other businesses they are not able to pass costs on to consumers, and they are already delivering impressive efficiencies year-on-year. Many pharmacies are already at breaking point, and we are concerned about the impact this will have on the services they offer and on which so many people rely.

Pharmacies nationwide have made an enormous contribution to the pandemic response efforts, keeping their doors wide open to serve their communities and in doing so saving some 24 million GP appointments a year. The Chancellor’s vision for a high wage economy and time of optimism must go hand in hand with support for this critical network of healthcare providers.”