£200m Funding Announced as Part of Plans to Improve Access to NHS Data
You will have seen the communication from Nishan yesterday highlighting the Life Sciences Innovative Manufacturing Fund. This funding is part of a wider £260 million package to support healthcare research and manufacturing, £200 million of which is to be invested in improving access to NHS data through Trusted Research Environments (TREs) and digital clinical trial services.
Following a briefing with Prof Sir John Bell, Office for Life Sciences Director, Roz Campion, and senior officials in NHS England/Improvement, ABHI understands that the NHS Transformation Directorate will lead on the data infrastructure elements, whilst others, including, Innovate UK and Health Data Research UK, will use separate funding to build analytics capability within the system. The infrastructure element will include expanding the scope of a network of sub-national/regional TREs with access to a range of genomics and other datasets including cancer, digital pathology networks and radiology.
We are also very pleased to see recognition of the need to enhance patient and public support and enthusiasm for the use of NHS health data for research and development purposes. Indeed, ABHI have consistently made the case for an awareness campaign to achieve this, and we understand from officials that this will be funded as part of the award.
These briefing slides provide further detail on the strategy behind the announcement. ABHI will continue to work with the relevant organisations as plans are implemented as part of our Digital Health programme, with the work being led through the recently formed Data Sub Group. If you are interested in joining the group please do contact me.
