How can NHS and industry partnerships transform patient care?

For the NHS to respond to the growing demands of the patients it serves, healthcare providers are partnering with companies like MSD to deliver innovative, patient-first projects.

Our ability to deliver these long-standing, collaborative projects relies on the Department of Health and Social Care’s joint working mandate. The mandate enables us to discover and invent new ways to support patients, their families and their loved ones, every day.

One example, which I am personally very proud of, is the Lung Cancer Pathway Development Project with the University Hospitals Birmingham Foundation Trust, which won a bronze “Best Pharmaceutical Partnership with the NHS” award at the recent HSJ Partnership Awards.

Together with Birmingham and the referring trusts of the West Midlands, we set about optimising the lung cancer pathway in line with the National Optimal Lung Cancer Pathway, to improve service quality, service efficiency, productivity, and patient experience.

We assisted UHB in identifying significant disparities in patient access to services and treatment – both between local hospitals and between patients within the same services. Following which, through close collaboration, we were able to implement improvements which contributed to earlier referral, diagnosis and treatment of lung cancer patients, resulting in significant time savings throughout the pathway.

These changes enabled UHB to meet the 28-day faster diagnostic standard across three of four sites, the 31-day treatment target at all sites and the 62-day referral to treatment target at all sites.

Significant time savings were made in lung cancer pathways across sites including:

• Two-day saving in the Queen Elizabeth pathway;
• 68.5-day saving in the Solihull pathway;
• 80-day saving in the Heartlands pathway; and
• 94-day saving in the Good Hope pathway.

Additionally, seven days were saved individually at Heartlands, Good Hope, and Solihull by creating a uniform triage process.

Other improvements we co-created included the introduction of a single standard operating procedure for direct-to-CT, increased capacity for triage meetings, new clinic slots for diagnosed lung cancer patients, a dedicated lung cancer resections ward, the commissioning of a new da Vinci Robot and the funding of Lung Pathway Navigators.

This approach not only delivered clear insight and understanding of the issues and possible solutions, but also enabled the implementation of a pathway which no longer pushed issues up or down stream.

Creating collaborative working across previously siloed departments was central to the success of this project. At the heart of our approach was early engagement and inclusion of all stakeholders. The use of qualitative and quantitative data was also key. Being agile enough to implement changes to live working practices enabled immediate change and benefits to patients.

This project would not have been possible without the dedication and expertise of all parties involved. I am incredibly proud of the outcomes we achieved and look forward to future opportunities to work collaboratively with the NHS to improve the cancer care pathway for patients. By working together, we can deliver more supportive, faster and positive outcomes.

If you and your team would like to hear more about how MSD can support you, then you can find out more about our Capacity and Pathway support offerings here and see a full list of projects we have supported here.