Panel 2 | Health - Generating Return on Investment
Speakers:Dr Rishi Das Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, Health Innovation Network South London | Lotus Qi, Head of MedTech, Capital Enterprise | Anisha Mayor, UK Head of Healthcare, WSP | Jade Appleton, Director of Corporate Affairs, London & Partners | Dr Ambalika Batra-Penny, Head of Enterprise, Innovation & Contracts, City St George’s University of London | Dr Anne Blackwood, Chief Executive Officer, Health Tech Enterprise | Devi Kolli, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, i3 Simulations | Elizabeth Harris, Head of Inward Investment, Sutton Borough Council
Dr Rishi Das Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, Health Innovation Network South London
We’re going to talk about health and generating a return on investment, which is a super important topic, particularly in a predominantly taxpayer-funded system, being able to demonstrate what we’re doing, what the impact is and use that to inform choices about where we invest in healthcare and health more broadly is super important. So I’m pleased to have a very experienced and informed panel to join me, but also a very large panel. Ambi, do you want to go first?
Dr Ambalika Batra-Penny, Head of Enterprise, Innovation & Contracts, City St George’s University of London
Hi everyone. I’m Ambalika Batra-Penny, and I’m the Head of Enterprise and Innovation at the newly formed City St George’s University of London. So in August this year, City University of London merged with St George’s University of London, which was a medical school based on the site with St George’s Hospital, based in Tooting.
St George’s has been part of the health landscape within South London since 1976 when it moved down from Hyde Park corner, and together now as City St George’s, we’re one of the largest higher education destinations for students within London, and we’re also one of the biggest suppliers of the health workforce in London.
I lead what is classically called the technology transfer office within the University, which supports the translation of academic research into innovation to have a real-world impact. But over the last 10 to 15 years, roles and offices like ours have broadened their scope to encourage entrepreneurship, engage with the public and policymakers and provide funding programs that facilitate knowledge exchange and access to facilities and equipment to industry partners.
One of the things that we’re doing in this sector is we’ve just launched the Health Innovation Network, which is a program of activities that specifically focuses on supporting innovation happening within SMEs, policymakers, enterprises and startups. We do this through a series of funding programs, including our SME Innovation Voucher Programme, which is how we’ve engaged with i3 Simulations but also provides access to our facilities and equipment and our academic and clinical expertise and clinical facilities.
Elizabeth Harris, Head of Inward Investment, Sutton Borough Council
Hi everyone. I’m Liz Harris. I’m Head of Inward Investment at Sutton Council, and the reason that I’m part of the panel today is because, within Sutton, we have the London Cancer Hub, which was mentioned earlier today.
The London Cancer Hub is already Europe’s leading cancer research and treatment hub because we’ve got the Institute of Cancer Research and the Royal Marsden based on the site since the 1950s and 1960s, and those two organisations already collaborate on cancer research treatment.
We’ve got a vision as a partnership across the campus to create the world’s leading cancer treatment and research hub, and this is supported by the commercial component of the site being developed by Viva Capital Partners working with Socius, so they plan to develop up to a million square feet of life science and ancillary spaces over the coming years. We’ve also got Epsom and St Helier Hospital, so it’s an amazing opportunity to create jobs and new business space within South London, but it will also further the treatment.
Dr Anne Blackwood, Chief Executive Officer, Health Tech Enterprise
Hi, good afternoon. My name is Anne Blackwood, Chief Executive of an organisation called Health Tech Enterprise. We were set up about 20 years ago as a spinout from Royal Papworth Hospital in Cambridge. We do two things: we help NHS and academic organisations to identify, protect, develop and commercialise medical technologies for the healthcare market.
We also work with a lot of startups and SMEs in the med tech industry who are trying to sell their products to the NHS and other healthcare markets, and we help them to understand how to navigate those marketplaces, generate the evidence and data required to look at business case to purchase the products.
My opening points in terms of return on investment and thinking particularly about how we can align national health priorities with local economic growth opportunities. One of the key things we need to think about as localities is how we foster more public-private partnerships and how we engage the NHS industry universities, particularly our communities, in translating national healthcare priorities into what local communities want and need.
We know that the NHS has several care delivery shifts that it’s trying to achieve. Those are things like hospital to home, treatment, prevention and digital, but what does that mean for innovators, researchers and communities, how do we translate those needs into products and services that the healthcare system can adopt?
There are several barriers, and we hear them every day, about the challenge of actually getting innovation and technology into the NHS, and those barriers have been around for a long time.
Hearing again from some of the conversations earlier today, we have to recognise that the NHS is extraordinarily busy, the capacity and the resources to do change management effectively are often not there, and that creates challenges for innovators who have come up with really good technologies and really good innovations that can make a difference to patients, and it can be very frustrating.
Even when clinicians are willing to engage with technology, it can be really difficult to get the bandwidth to change. I think there are lots of things that we can do to help create new pathways to adopt innovation, and I look forward to discussing them.
Lotus Qi, Head of MedTech, Capital Enterprise
Hi everyone, my name is Lotus, and I’m the Head of MedTech and Capital Enterprise. Capital Enterprise is a not-for-profit focused on supporting the UK startup ecosystem. We’ve been around for over 30 years, and we mostly focus on supporting underrepresented founders. We engage in AI and then MedTech as well.
I lead our flagship program in the cancer tech accelerator, where we work with researchers and academics who have been researching in the space of oncology and want to commercialise this in the translation space.
We have this nine-month program, funded by Cancer Research UK, to help these researchers understand what they need to do and know to successfully commercialise their research and then try to connect them with the industry and investors.
Briefly, my starting point is a little bit biased accelerated in very specific spaces, especially in health tech, but it’s very important to convene people and industry expertise because, as an individual entrepreneur researcher, it’s impossible to get access to these ecosystems.
LSBU and the BIG Summit are doing a fantastic job of doing some of this, but I think for South London, breaking down even more silos is going to be a really good step forward.
Anisha Mayor, UK Head of Healthcare, WSP
Hi everybody. I’m Anisha May. I’m the UK Head of Healthcare for WSP. WSP is a multidisciplinary practice ranging from healthcare advisory all the way through to operational commissioning and all the design in between.
Prior to that, I was at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust, running one of their redevelopment projects, which was for the NHP, the New Hospital Program at St Mary’s Hospital.
Back to needing public-private partnerships, I couldn’t agree more, it may be a bit controversial, but I spent about 15 years doing that. In terms of what we do in the actual area of South London, we work very much on the transport side, and we’ve had an enduring relationship with King’s College Hospital, most recently upgrading their electrical infrastructure, as well as doing the critical care unit.
My key points are talking about enabling infrastructure, having been in the NHS, what was important to me and the team was finding a site for a really major hospital that enabled infrastructure. We’d look at Old Oak Common, for example, and Development Corporation, and what’s helpful is you end up having that enabling infrastructure that builds it, and they will come. That is fundamental.
Having worked at LLDC on the Olympic Park, it’s also the same: you bring forward developers and if we look at innovation districts, not only do you have the enabling infrastructure, but you also need to bring in the anchor institutions.
In this part of London, we’ve got Lidl, PayPal, and the Eden Project, but capitalising, I’m sure you can imagine which pharmaceutical and life science industries of companies we’ve been attracting.
Welcoming the five-year funding settlement, potentially for the NHS, will allow increased planning and that public-private partnership, I’m talking about the likes of the council with developers. But equally, you could get UKRI, Homes England, those sorts of funders of first resort to be the trigger point and a catalyst to bring something forward and to bring key examples. You think about the district heating system that Barcelona put into place before those public sector assets tapped into it. It is important you size the grid accordingly.
You think about campus innovation or vitality, that’s in Newcastle, that’s about creating a living lab measuring those healthcare outcomes ahead of time, up 10 to 30 years, and that helps inform the future healthcare infrastructure as well.
If we think about the States, comparatively North East America, you’ve got 70 million people there; we have that comparably in the whole of the UK. What I’d be encouraging is this distributed model of collaboration rather than competition between all our cities. Yes, we’ve got the Golden Triangle, but we’ve got a whole load of other cities in this country that we can learn lots of lessons from.
Devi Kolli, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, i3 Simulations
Hi everyone. I’m Devi Kolli, the CEO and Co-Founder of i3 Simulations. We are a virtual medical simulation company specifically catering to healthcare sectors. My core team goes back about a decade and a half into technology deep tech, particularly blending AI into immersive tech. And why? Because we believe in the power of not just immersive and interactive but also intuitive.
The non-linear aspect of training is very important for healthcare and medical professionals, particularly where the gameplay is controlled by the data that’s coming from the back end. The simulation starts to adapt based on the pre-existing learner’s knowledge; this is where we stand out from any other modality or training, whether it’s e-learning, mobile learning, or even VR learning, as we believe in a non-scripted approach to training.
My key points for today for return on investment is there are, of course, challenges trying both from a procurement point of view but also from an adoption point of view if you’re trying to sell into NHS.
We are a private-led company, as a startup, we introduced our tech in the US and then went into a very tiny market in Singapore only because they’re quite forthcoming when talking about cutting-edge technology. What I feel is missing here when it comes to procurement is that we are still stuck in old ways. It’s very important to note that there is a lot of evidence in terms of how digital learning has evolved, particularly with immersive learning. There are 3000 publications evidencing the power of virtual reality learning across sectors. Only 15% of that 500 publications are specific to healthcare.
The procurement still talks about not having enough evidence, why? Because they do not want to look into other sectors and learn from transferable possibilities. That’s something I urge for procurements to change coming into adoption.
I piggyback on what Anne said before the panel about the cultural shift, and change management is supercritical. This is a problem across sectors, not necessarily just health care. The only thing I’d like to share is the successful case studies we have in 20 countries by introducing tech, but we need to see organisations introducing both internal and external evangelists or advocators. They are so critical and cannot be underestimated in terms of the power they bring in for the adoption and settlement of new technologies, which is the future.
Jade Appleton, Director of Corporate Affairs, London & Partners
Hi, I’m Jade Appleton. I’m the Director of Corporate Affairs at London & Partners. We are London’s growth agency. We work closely with Howard Dawber, who you heard from earlier today, and also Jason Perry, the Mayor of Croydon and the whole of South London, on how to deliver growth.
We do scale-up companies, and we do foreign direct investment. We also target the most underserved in the communities to access business support, and we’ve recently launched London’s Life Science offer. We founded London Life Science Week, and at the moment, we’re looking at how we can bring billions of pounds of international investment into London through something called Opportunity London, which is a new investment project, really opening the market to investors to make it accessible, inclusive, and something that they can access easily, in a really simple way.
My key takeaways are harnessing the infrastructure that we’ve got, the incredible talent ecosystem that London has, that public-private partnership innovation piece, and also showcasing. So we’re doing all these great things, but if we’re not telling people globally that’s what we’re doing, then people aren’t going to come to London, and we’re not going to be able to generate return on investment. So it’s harnessing that talent pool and telling people what we’re doing in the story overall.
Dr Rishi Das Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, Health Innovation Network South London
Thanks for those opening comments. I’m Rishi Das Gupta; I’m the Chief Executive of the Health Innovation Network. We’re a part of the NHS, focused on adoption and spread, and part of that is importantly signalling back what our priorities are and what our needs are.
So I thought that those opening comments were really important, and you were raising the question of should we have a narrower focus of what we’re shouting that South London is great about and should we be collaborating with other cities in terms of what they cover and what we cover now? A couple of you mentioned cancer and the future workforce, and that’s come up with themes throughout today.
We’ve got people from pretty much every country in the world living here in South London if you start with what your thoughts are about what we should be focusing on and what South London is great at at the moment?
Elizabeth Harris, Head of Inward Investment, Sutton Borough Council
There’s so much in South London, and we do have some real strengths. As was said earlier in the presentation by the Deputy Mayor, we need to make sure that South London is recognised as being part of London and being a thriving economic area, which does bring those assets into the overall picture.
I will say cancer because there’s a huge opportunity for that within Sutton at the London Cancer Hub, but we’ve also got some amazing research and development assets across wider South London as well that we could be looking into, not least the university partners who are in the room today, which is brilliant.
I know that South London Partnership is also doing a lot of work around retrofit at the moment and tackling looking at the green economy and the opportunities which are created from that. Where we’re bringing investment in for it to be touching on life sciences, improving the health of the area, but also looking at the environmental standards that we can be achieving through, that can be a real asset for the area.
Jade Appleton, Director of Corporate Affairs, London & Partners
One of the biggest strengths that South London has, I should say I’m slightly biased because I was a councillor in Croydon up until April, and I grew up in Wallington, is the support of the ecosystem that we can develop here.
We’ve got fantastic colleges, and we’ve got fantastic education facilities where we can nurture that talent ecosystem and set ourselves out as unique in London and separate as a place where we’re looking at how everyone can very inclusively get involved in the life science and the health area. It’s something that we have an opportunity to make ourselves unique for, and that will attract that investment across from global investors.
Dr Ambalika Batra-Penny, Head of Enterprise, Innovation & Contracts, City St George’s University of London
We have a lot of capacity within South London to educate their health professionals and the next batch of health professionals in general. It’s not just medicine but allied health professionals as well.
There’s a lot of opportunity with Roehampton and City St George’s now, and a lot of what we’re doing across South London involves lots of universities, including Kingston.
Devi Kolli, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, i3 Simulations
I’m not from South London, so I’ll have to speak quite generally here, I would piggyback on what Anisha was mentioning. Just coming from the provider, SME viewpoint, what’s critical here is we’re not committing, we have to be collaborating.
With the technology evolving so quickly, we all want more ecosystems to be able to evidence and put out these trials as quickly as we can for rapid prototyping. If there’s a blueprint that South London is going to provide to be able to expand into other cities, I like that opportunity.
Anisha Mayor, UK Head of Healthcare, WSP
We’re probably always comparing ourselves to Oxford and Cambridge. The beauty of South London is that you’ve got the widest demographic here. Not that I want to call it the Living Lab, but I did refer to the Campus for Ageing and Vitality, and that’s what they do talk about themselves to be.
But you’ve got the full spread if you think about Core20PLUS5 and the five key health inequalities you’ve probably got them here. You’ve got a real opportunity to make a change and measure those outcomes on the ground, that’s something to be proud of.
Lotus Qi, Head of MedTech, Capital Enterprise
Two things that I did want to highlight is that LSBU trains a lot of nurses. I was told that 25% of nurses who work in London come from here, and that’s tremendous. Nurses are the backbone of healthcare, and they can focus on that.
Another great Institute is South London and Maudsley, which is one of the best mental health centres in the world and in the UK. There is already so much that self-learning can focus and grow on.
Dr Anne Blackwood, Chief Executive Officer, Health Tech Enterprise
Coming from the Cambridge ecosystem, Cambridge is fantastic at research, and innovation is not as good at translation as it might like to think.
Maybe one of the opportunities here, given how well joined up the community is and just looking at people that you’ve managed to get in the room today, there’s a real opportunity for you to be great actually at implementation. Why not grasp that opportunity with the diversity of the community that you’ve got, with the stakeholders that you can get in a room in an afternoon like this, and be good at actual implementation?
Dr Rishi Das Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, Health Innovation Network South London
I’ll segue slightly to say that’s a great view of what we might draw into London, what London might be differentiated on if we were to take the view of how we support earlier stage companies, and what we do in universities, in our anchor institutions and work through that, I wonder if any of you would like to comment on that and what we might support for early stage companies?
Lotus Qi, Head of MedTech, Capital Enterprise
The two key parts are not super revolutionary, but one is making our process easier. Translation is one of the big economic backbones of the UK, there’s so much great research being done, but then translating and commercialising that in the spin-out phase can be difficult. I’m not criticising TTO at all. I’m just saying it’s facilitated to make it an easier journey for universities and across, which would massively unlock potential.
Dr Rishi Das Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, Health Innovation Network South London
I’m going to challenge you on that one for a moment: England is the easiest place in the world to set up a company, and universities agree on what the tech transfer process is. What they’re going to have as the equity state that universities keep, and how it works, what’s stopping us?
Dr Ambalika Batra-Penny, Head of Enterprise, Innovation & Contracts, City St George’s University of London
It’s the whole infrastructure that needs to be in place to support that spin-out or to support an SME partner that might want to engage with us, and that’s everything from deciding on IP situations to finding patent applications to contracts.
Legal contracts are such an issue when engaging with industry partners and setting up spinouts, and it’s something that we at City St George’s have been trying to focus on because we know that it can cause major delays and damage your partnership. It’s things like that that we haven’t been focusing on, and we don’t necessarily pay that much attention to and probably need to be focused on. Equity is important, but there’s more.
Jade Appleton, Director of Corporate Affairs, London & Partners
I’m going to agree, and we run, as part of London and Partners, an organisation called Med City, which is looking at how we can make the exact connections that you were talking about.
What we’re trying to look at is matching people up in the way that you’ve been describing so that London, the UK, Europe and other markets are navigable, and you can link up all these different parts.
The whole reason for setting up a city a year ago was to create that collaboration and to give that advice, ‘How do you navigate this? How do you make that connection? How do you bring everyone together and sort of work on a total life science offer?’ We’re focused on London, but that doesn’t mean that it can’t go country-wide.
We’re working with 12 different markets globally to then take what we do in London and explain to them in clear terms how they can navigate that market, so they want to come here. It’s starting, but I agree with you, we’re not there yet. We’re in a very, very early stage.
Devi Kolli, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, i3 Simulations
Yeah, I completely agree with a lot of the panel points here, mainly because the biggest issue is communication. I know we, as an organisation and as an SME, have to search very hard to understand what support is available out there, and we only knew that there is support out there because of the decade and a half of working in the UK. Otherwise, we wouldn’t have known it.
We also know that because in the medical sector, you need academic partnerships to be there to handhold us and create the evidence of that product. If we’re going to say, ‘Our products are great.’ no one is going to buy in unless there is evidence that’s backing it.
All I would say is that I know you’re all working very hard, but let’s focus a little more on communication, and these forums help.
Dr Rishi Das Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, Health Innovation Network South London
Specifically the communication of what services are out there to help.
Anisha Mayor, UK Head of Healthcare, WSP
From a practical point of view, just thinking about types of space. You go from an incubator to an accelerated space, but also now enabling the lease rates to be put into place.
In South London, you’ve already utilised and, meanwhile, used space, but whether that’s connected in terms of communication, developers will come forward. They take that space up to then put it to permanent use. Is there a communication connection, for example, for SMEs to know where the next avenue is or to go and place your business into?
Dr Anne Blackwood, Chief Executive Officer, Health Tech Enterprise
In terms of the whole legal framework, one of the challenges is just how to bring in a commercial mindset to some of the negotiations because we don’t focus on the endpoint.
The endpoint is, how do we get this technology, how do we get this innovation open to the community, into the hands of clinicians or communities or whoever it might be that needs to use it? We need to protect the interests of the university or the NHS hospital that we’re working with, we focus on the wrong end of the lens and negotiate things to the death.
There are guidelines around what universities and the NHS should negotiate when it comes to IP-showing agreements, and my record for negotiating a licensing deal between an NHS hospital, a University and a commercial company is two years, and that was a year ago, it can take a long time.
Companies are pulling their hair out because they’re desperately trying to get this technology or innovation out there. We need to just focus on what balances the need to protect the interests of the public sector with our job as translational executives to get technology out there and get it to market.
Dr Rishi Das Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, Health Innovation Network South London
That’s helpful to get a sense of what the challenges are and the complexity of London as a whole, as a population of 10 million people and lots of universities and thirty-plus boroughs all kicks in. Your corporate communication is useful and helpful to segue from there into the challenges around funding and how that works.
Devi Kolli, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, i3 Simulations
Interesting to ask that question because this part was just going into my head. As much as I love Innovate UK, and there’s been a lot of support, I feel we’re not being practical here on many levels.
Not just Innovate, per se, everyone involved in the public and private segment of funding is because, in the medical space, it’s far more excluded. If you’re loss-making, it’s like you don’t even know how to run a business.
But the truth is, in today’s world, you are going to be loss-making, especially since the NHS is such a publicly funded organisation, but where is the funding coming from? Given the political, social, and economic situation and the volatility that we are in, this funding is constantly shrinking.
Do not get put off as a startup company thinking that, ‘Oh, I’m loss-making.’ Unfortunately, these funding and grants are so linked to being profitable straight away that when you start talking about the virtualisation two years into it, they expect to see profits. How is that possible? I’m sorry, but it’s such a contrast to practicality.
Anisha Mayor, UK Head of Healthcare, WSP
If we could just bring something else up in terms of financing, and I think it was a previous session about how do we keep our workers here? Key worker housing is really important, but it doesn’t get off the ground.
Particularly for the NHS, they’re ring-fenced in terms of their limits and what they can sign up for on their balance sheets. Now, having this multi-agency approach with South London Partnership, with the ICB, the hope is you’ve got this waterfall. So if the NHS can’t occupy it, other blue light workers could occupy it, then the council, and then potentially universities.
It’s a positive because with the amount of international income that is coming into some of the universities in South London, they’ll be deemed to be private, and therefore, the off-balance sheet solution could be utilised, and I’d be encouraging more of that, which therefore releases the shackles around the NHS, but they would also benefit from that, and hopefully keeping those nurses in the borough is critical.
Lotus Qi, Head of MedTech, Capital Enterprise
From a venture capital investment perspective, there are two values of that first: when companies spin out, or when they’re just established, and investors are saying, ‘No, you don’t have any data, we don’t want to take the risk.’ It’s really funny that venture capitalists are so risk averse, but, then around Series A, they’re happy to come in when there is early-stage data and be like, ‘Okay, this seems like a good bet.’
When it comes to funding clinical trials, which is notoriously expensive and difficult to get through, all of them shy away, and they’re like, ‘No, no, we don’t want to take the risk.’ So, a lot of companies have to go to the US.
There’s a big brain drain from the UK into the States because the only funding available for these stages of investment is there, and it’s a huge shame. But it is important for early-stage companies to get that funding, even though it’s become increasingly competitive to start getting that rehabilitation first transfer funding.
Elizabeth Harris, Head of Inward Investment, Sutton Borough Council
It’s important to think about the impact of improvement in health and economic activity as well and broaden out how we’re thinking about the return on investment and where the funding could come from.
If we want an active workforce within South London, we need a healthy workforce within South London. A lot of the work that we’re talking about today can support that. We know that, for example, cancer and a lot of illnesses disproportionately affect people who are from more deprived backgrounds.
Actually where, we can improve treatment and research and focus it on those people who need it most, supporting our economy as a whole as well. We should be thinking about it in that broad way, and it does feel like, increasingly, that’s the way that some of the policies are moving as well.
The increased links between the Department for Work and Pensions working with local authorities and with health and social care colleagues through integrated care partnerships and other programs is an opportunity for us to think about how we can improve the health of the workforce.
Devi Kolli, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, i3 Simulations
I was talking to my colleague earlier this morning about pre-Brexit. We felt that we were able to access public funding easily, whether that’s coming down to European funding being accessible to us more or whether that’s creeping down to the regional funding, it was more accessible for sure, and including Innovate UK funding, the percentage of success rates were much higher.
But then, post-COVID, it’s a completely different picture. Before, if you were about 70% into the scoring within a way, we could be expecting something. But now we’ve scored close to 81-84%, and you’re still not getting in a success line. That’s pretty demotivating because, as a small startup, every source counts.
When you do not see that success coming through, you then start debating if it’s even worthwhile for us to put the efforts in, or should we just focus on private funding? It’s a very hard balance for startups in the UK.
Dr Rishi Das Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, Health Innovation Network South London
Quite a lot to think about there, we’re talking about what capital there is, whether it’s patient or not, where the gaps in the capital funding are, and also in terms of what that means for the population and where that sits. Given that we have all of you on the panel and we have local authority representation, is there anything that you would ask your local authority colleagues in terms of what infrastructures help them and how that works?
Anisha Mayor, UK Head of Healthcare, WSP
One key question is whether or not you’re working with the GLA. I work in the GLA healthcare expert panel, and the key question we have is about the business case process.
You alluded to how you measure these healthcare outcomes when you’ve got an economic business case for rail, whatever project that is to get something from A to B, and they’re going to generate income for the UK and PLC, how do you harness the same source of outcomes through a business case process with health?
Generally, it’s viewed as an economic drain, if we get it through the GLA and the GLA through to central government, we hope that we can have parity in those business cases.
Lotus Qi, Head of MedTech, Capital Enterprise
As a council, you have a much broader view of what the health challenges are. Sometimes, I find startups innovate within their own bubble without realising what the real health challenges are.
Combining and communicating that, creating health challenges and inviting startup companies to come and solve these would be exciting.
Dr Rishi Das Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, Health Innovation Network South London
Somebody has put through Slido that there’s a lot of lab space being delivered across London, and you’ve described the Cancer Hub, but how do we ensure that the local communities benefit from the employment opportunities that these infrastructure projects offer?
Elizabeth Harris, Head of Inward Investment, Sutton Borough Council
Our role in the Cancer Hub has been an enabler. We purchased land that was previously owned by the NHS, alongside anchor institutions, and we worked to form that partnership across all of the Cancer Hub partners and used our role in tapping into some of the public funding and support that was out there.
Looking at the public estate program, the strategic investment pot, business rates, and retention, those funding streams have enabled us to prepare that site for development. Demolishing redundant buildings, developing a proof of concept to show that people do want to be based on the site, and then running a process to complete a leasehold sale to Aviva Capital Partners, who can bring the private investment that we need and also improve transport in the area.
We’ve tapped into lending up funds by making the compelling case because of the additional jobs that were created through the London Cancer Hub, the additional space for businesses, but also meeting the needs of residents to double trade frequency.
The role of local authorities is, in part, tapping into those different public sector pots which are available to create the right conditions and give that certainty that’s needed for the private sector investment in the space.
In terms of how we open up that access to the jobs for local people, it’s about making sure that we’re building in that work from the start, using existing programs. We’ve got amazing education assets across South London through our colleges, schools, and higher education. It’s through partnerships like BIG South London that we need to be talking about the opportunities which are available in future and looking at the pipeline of students which we can support the high-level jobs, but also not forgetting about that 45% of jobs that don’t require degrees and all of the supply chain roles as well.
That’s something we’re going to be working on with Socius, as developers on the site, to make sure that we got that access through and on the Cancer Hub.
We’ve also developed the Harris Academy school on the campus itself so that we can think about that journey from people starting their education in the London Cancer Hub, raising their aspirations and ultimately working on that site. The business case around health is a tricky one, but it is really important because we know that improving people’s health does have a wider economic impact, and actually, how we articulate and quantify that is important when you’re getting the funding.
Dr Rishi Das Gupta, Chief Executive Officer, Health Innovation Network South London
We’ve all touched on the return on investment, evidence for what’s working and broader aspects around the economic impact of having a healthy population. I just wondered if any of you want to share what you think the gaps are in terms of evidence that’s needed to show a return on investment. I ask this because we’ve been investing in the team to try and deliver support in this area of the Health Innovation Network.
Devi Kolli, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder, i3 Simulations
First and foremost, I want to flag that we are no longer just about South London or the nation, it is borderless, it’s global. There’s a lot of pressure on the UK to improve its export income, and there’s so much to take into consideration.
We’re talking about evidence of return on investment. They want the NHS and every organisation out there in the healthcare sector to think about that old-fashioned way of thinking because the biggest challenge we’re having here is that we’re not just competing with the evolution of technology. We’re having to innovate on business models; it’s not just about a number or transaction, it’s more so about the value we’re providing.
Often, a lot of the applications that we are constantly improving are also sitting into the value add, and how are you going to measure them?
Finding the measure of success is a very tricky thing, and this is where we need academic experts and partnerships to come in to play along with the industry and the providers together to define that success because the key announcers are there.
Going back to planning about collaboration, it’s more of an ecosystem. Let’s not compete, let’s collaborate.
Dr Anne Blackwood, Chief Executive Officer, Health Tech Enterprise
Particularly when we talk about the NHS, we talk about real-world evaluation, how do you re-measure the impact of something once it started in the community?
We don’t do that well enough. In terms of being successful, we need to think about how we can enable that practically. We need methodologists, and we need to help economists. We need evaluation expertise, but we need to set clear tests and standards that people need to meet for adoption.
The issue is there’s never enough evidence that you can continue generating, and still, someone will sell. So, to be fair to innovators, we need to set clear targets or KPIs for an innovation or a technology threshold to meet. Once we know that they can meet that, then, except that actually, why don’t we scale this across 200 hospitals instead of saying, ‘Okay, now you need to go and sell to 200 hospitals and write 200 different business cases’ because that’s what we make.
Anisha Mayor, UK Head of Healthcare, WSP
On the NHS, in terms of benefits realisation, it’s usually a massive, great, big time lag that then leads us to very rarely doing a post-occupancy evaluation. At that point, you can tell whether or not you’ve got a big return on investment.
It goes back to the points in the business case process, and there has to be acknowledgement in healthcare. That you can have a change of leadership or a change of management, and there are staging posts for measuring those benefits that need to be short, medium and long-term.
It’s not seen as a failure if those benefits are vastly different. But we need to get rid of being terrified and scared to do it. Somehow, that has to be changing culture rather than just strategy.
