NHS innovation stalls as doctors shun ‘dirty’ work in private sector

LIFE-SAVING NHS innovations are being held up because doctors think it is “dirty” to work with the private sector, the Government’s most senior health adviser has said.

Dame Sally Davies, the chief medical officer, told Parliament that staff were reluctant to associate with profit-making bodies even if it denied them the chance to improve their skills.

She said that if the NHS was to improve its research capacity there needed to be a “revolving door” between the health service, academia and industry bodies such as pharmaceutical companies and manufacturers.

Her call came as the Government’s chief scientific adviser acknowledged that the training of NHS doctors capable of researching new cures and procedures had taken a “backward step”.

The pair were giving evidence yesterday to the House of Lords on the Government’s flagship Life Sciences and Industrial Strategy inquiry, which is seen as a crucial plank of the UK’S future economic success.

Dame Sally, who has been the chief medical officer for England since 2011, told peers: “One of our problems is that, still, clinicians in the NHS think it’s dirty to work with the profit-making sector.”

She added that people needed to “feel proud” of working with industry.

“We need a revolving door where academics and NHS people go into industry and bring the learning back, and it’s not happening as much as it could. I think we do still have a problem.”

She said that, while young doctors were happy to be involved in digital health start-ups, spending time in the core medical industries would be more helpful. Her intervention comes in the context of increased hostility among the workforce to any notion of further private involvement in the health service following last year’s acrimonious junior doctors’ contract dispute in which the Government was repeatedly accused of secret plans to privatise the NHS, which ministers denied.

Senior doctors, responsible for deciding which drugs and treatments to commission, are wary of being seen to have a conflict of interest by associating themselves with drug companies.

Dame Sally said the NHS was sometimes unfairly portrayed by industry as slow to innovate because, “they find it difficult when the NHS does not acquire their products”.

‘One of our problems is that, still, clinicians in the NHS think it’s dirty to work with the profit-making sector’