Prevention may be the cure, but innovation the best course of treatment

Dr Cheryl Crocker, interim Chief Operating Officer at the Health Innovation Network, explains the vital role innovation plays to not only reduce waiting lists and improve access to care, but to decrease system pressure by improving people’s health and keeping them well for longer. 

The new Government has rightly declared its focus on moving the health service from sickness to prevention. This shift in the system is crucial for improving public health outcomes.  

Whilst innovation is often seen as the shiny new thing, or the “nice to have” for local healthcare systems to treat patients with, there is also huge amounts of innovative practice and opportunity in supporting the prevention agenda across entire pathways too, be that through supporting patients to keep themselves well for longer through monitoring and management digital tools, detecting early stages of disease and intervening, or optimising medicines usage.  

Innovation in healthcare goes beyond just new technologies; it’s about transforming entire pathways to support prevention and improve people’s health. 

Across the Health Innovation Network, our focus is not only on how innovation can deliver better patient care, but on how it can tackle both preventable conditions and preventable events, to ensure more people can live in health for longer.  

Primary prevention with a long-term focus  

The change that’s needed in the NHS won’t happen overnight – we must be working collaboratively with our healthcare systems to think long-term about how we can make a real impact and make that shift to from reacting to preventing. In North Central London, UCLPartners have co-designed and co-developed a plan to improve the physical health for people with severe mental illness. The area has the highest prevalence of severe mental illness among ICSs in England, with people dying around 20 years earlier than the general population from largely preventable conditions.

The Longer Lives strategic delivery plan is currently being adopted as part of North Central London’s population health strategy, and will ensure people with SMI receive the best evidence-based care for risk factors such as smoking, high blood pressure, weight gain, diabetes and high cholesterol, to prevent future health conditions. A long-term plan focusing ultimately on prevention, we anticipate clinical impact in terms of reduced mortality rates from preventable causes in this population over the coming years. 

Secondary prevention  

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the cause of around 1.18 million hospital admissions each year, with annual costs of approximately £19bn in the UK. The Network’s national CVD programmes aimed to tackle this through increasing the uptake of lipid lowering therapies and increasing the identification of people with Familial Hypercholesterolemia (FH) – ensuring both long-term conditions could be properly treated and managed.  

Tailored approaches have been taken across the country depending on local needs and challenges – a huge strength of the Network in being 15 locally embedded organisations, who can come together to share expertise and deliver national impact. Over two years the proportion of people with known CVD treated to NICE-recommended thresholds has increased, as has the identification of genetically confirmed FH. This not only means patients are now getting the right care they need, but an estimated 9,000 heart attacks and strokes have been prevented. You can read more in our summary report.  

Early detection 

Through the Innovation for Healthcare Inequalities Programme (InHIP), delivered in collaboration with the Accelerated Access Collaborative, we’re also tackling health inequity by improving the health of underserved communities through early detection. Deprived communities are known to have reduced uptake of cancer screening programmes, whilst deaths from cancer are responsible for circa 20% of the life expectancy gap. 

Health Innovation East are working with voluntary, community and social enterprise organisations through a ‘Community Voices’ model to target refugees, migrants and homeless people to access a bowel cancer screening test. More than 300 conversations were held in total across 10 VCSE organisations, with almost 30% of individuals intending to order a testing kit as a result of the conversation. 

While in North Devon, where there is a 15-year lower life expectancy than in more affluent areas of the region, Health Innovation South West are supporting an innovation called a faecal immunochemical test (FIT) which can help detect signs of colorectal cancer early in a non-invasive and cost-effective way. Increasing uptake to FIT testing among this communities is a crucial step in reducing disparities in the area, improving early cancer detection – and ultimately saving lives. 

Prevention to support productivity  

We need to make services more able to deliver by tackling some of our most prevalent, preventable conditions. Innovation can help to reduce the demand in the system – whether that’s by doing something differently or trying something new.