OHE responds to the Health Foundation’s NHS Productivity Commission report, welcoming its recommendations while calling for fuller consideration of the innovation ecosystem in NHS productivity.
Commenting on the Health Foundation’s NHS Productivity Commission report, Professor Graham Cookson, Chief Executive of the Office of Health Economics, said:
“This is a timely and robust contribution to the debate on NHS productivity, and we welcome its recommendations. The report rightly highlights the NHS’s historic difficulty in adopting productivity-enhancing technology, but overlooks some of the key levers underpinning productivity and innovation. Its focus on allocative efficiency should extend to the role of innovative treatments and pharmaceuticals, which can free up capacity and restructure workforce processes by shifting care away from labour-intensive settings.
The report’s call for a ‘test and learn’ approach, for example, could draw on the evidence already generated by mechanisms such as the Cancer Drugs Fund and Innovative Medicines Fund. A complete picture of NHS productivity needs to account for the health system as a whole, including NICE, regulators, and industry.”