New year, new government and new opportunities

As a new year dawns and a new government gets its feet firmly under the table, my focus is on how 2025 can bring fresh opportunities for you to engage with the NHS effectively.

This year, my revamped online learning programme is designed specifically for pharma, med tech, and device companies looking to unlock new pathways into the NHS.

What I Learned from 2024

Looking back, 2024 was a year of tackling challenges head-on. For my NHS clients, the biggest hurdle was managing workload pressures. Staff are drowning in work and struggling to meet unrelenting demand.

My job is to bridge that gap – connecting NHS needs with the innovative solutions you provide. So that’s where my focus is. And, of course, sometimes I turn to the pharma, med tech and device companies I work with who I know have a solution to the problem at hand and I put the two together.

In doing so, we’ve created high-impact projects in:

• Wound care

• Diabetes

• Heart failure

• Chronic Kidney Disease Allergy

• ENT

• Asthma

• Hip Fracture

• Pain Management

• COPD

I’ve got two separate projects in Mental Health, one of which is a digital solution, which has gone down well with the NHS because it aligns very much with Lord Darzi’s view that digital transformation is absolutely crucial to help the NHS tackle the backlog.

I’ve helped secure projects in headache, migraine, shingles, the RSV vaccination programmes, the pneumococcal vaccine, and many different diagnostic projects.

The left shift will be crucial in 2025

I’ve also started a project in lipid management, which is a hospital subcontract, something likely to feature much more heavily next year in our work, because Lord Darzi wants what he calls ‘left shift’. Left shift means get the work out of hospital, moving it elsewhere but moving the resources with it, including the money. This is what happened in that lipid management project, and it’s a format I’ll definitely be working on in 2025.

I think the hospitals will require a bailout in 2025. When they get it, NHS England should be saying to them: “What plans have you got for left shift? Give us a list of the areas of work you’re going to left shift out of the hospital so we’re not bailing you out again next year.”

That’s probably not going to happen, but it certainly would be my challenging idea and my challenge back to the NHS.

GP Federations are more relevant as strategic partners than ever

In 2024, I’ve worked across the NHS landscape to help industry partners like you make meaningful connections and deliver impactful solutions.

I’ve collaborated with:

• Integrated Care Systems (ICS) to align projects with system-wide goals.

• Place commissioners to ensure local needs are met effectively.

• Provider collaboratives and primary care provider collaboratives to develop innovative, joined-up approaches to care.

I’ve also partnered with:

• General Practices and Primary Care Networks (PCNs) to streamline patient pathways.

• GP federations that support member practices and PCNs – an often-overlooked, yet crucial, part of the system. Many underestimate their value, but those who engage with them can unlock significant opportunities for collaboration.

Beyond primary care, I’ve worked with:

• Hospital trusts, mental health trusts, and community services, ensuring solutions are tailored to the frontline challenges they face.

No matter the level, the challenge remains the same: too much work, too few people to meet the demand. My focus is helping you position your products and services to address these pressures, reduce workload, and improve patient outcomes.

By understanding and engaging with the full NHS ecosystem, you can deliver solutions that truly resonate – and drive real results.

Create the perfect triangle to get your pitch listened to

We’ve been looking for innovation, the different ways of working that alleviate some of the workload pressure. That takes me neatly to my online learning modules, which I’ve enhanced and expanded for 2025.

One of the additions is customer interviews, including a terrific GP, Dr Yusuf Soni, in Stockton-on-Tees who talked about the need for an industry approach to show him the perfect triangle.

At the top of the triangle is the win for the patient, showing how the patient outcome is improved. In one of the bottom corners of the triangle is the win for the NHS. That could be fewer appointments, referrals, non-elective admissions or tackling inequalities. In the third and final corner, there’s the win for the partner company because that will be strictly tied to the improved patient outcome.

Yusuf is very keen to highlight that whoever he gets approached by – pharma, a commissioner, the hospital – unless it’s improving the patient outcome, he won’t engage because he’s drowning in workload.

Creating the perfect triangle is something I bring into all my work. With all the projects I mentioned earlier, we’re trying to improve the patient outcome and as a result of that have fewer appointments, referrals and non-elective admissions.

Sub-optimal treatment plays a big part in driving workload

There are two other elements we include in the online learning package around ways to frame your project, and that’s partly their income and partly the workforce. So those are components that will continue to be in the online learning package.

All the interviewees for the online learning package highlight that, more often than not, suboptimal treatment fuels their workload.

There are patients that are absolutely correctly diagnosed, they’ve started treatment but for 101 different reasons they’ve stopped taking the treatment.

There are other patients who are correctly diagnosed and are on the gold standard treatment from when they were initiated five years ago. They’re now not achieving a good outcome, and they’re back presenting in the NHS.

There are people who were correctly diagnosed and are on the right treatment, but they’re on initiation dose, they haven’t been titrated up, so they’re not experiencing a great outcome.

And finally, we have people who have not had any proper work up done yet and they’re presenting to the NHS for a proper diagnosis and care plan.

This ties back to that perfect triangle, because in suboptimal treatment, if you improve the patient outcome and you reduce the appointments, the referrals and the non-elective admissions, everybody wins – the patient, the NHS and the collaborating company.

No healthcare professional deliberately suboptimally treats any patient. It happens over time. The key is avoiding suboptimal treatment. We need early and correct diagnosis, leading to early and correct treatment, fewer appointments in general practice and referrals to hospital, and the big one – non-elective admissions to hospital.

Still waiting for the new government to show its hand

If I look at the political side of my work in 2024, there are two parts: pre–election and post-election.

Pre-election, I believe the government had pretty much given up. They knew a general election was coming. That’s why we were delayed with the operating framework. We usually get that at Christmas, it didn’t come until Easter. It literally arrived right at the end of March, three months later than we would normally get it.

Two months after that, we had a general election. We also got an update to the primary care network contract (the PCN DES, as it’s more commonly called). That was updated right at the end of March and there was no real change, it just kicked the ball down the road.

I believe the new government is still trying to pick that ball up. While they’ve settled with the junior doctors who were striking, they’re working with hospitals and looking at bailouts for 2025 while general practice is currently adrift.

General Practice contracts on the edge of collapse

The increase in the minimum wage and in employers’ national insurance contributions has absolutely crippled general practice. Even small practices are looking at finding £50,000 with no new income or uplift in their contract to fund that.

The dire predictions are that 600 practices might hand their contracts back. If we get to that level, it will be an absolute catastrophe for patients, for the NHS and, of course, for the people currently running and working in those general practices.

So my hope is that the wonderful Katie Bramall-Stainer, the general practice committee lead negotiator for the British Medical Association, will get her opportunity to sit down with Health Secretary Wes Streeting and sort this out.

It’s got to be addressed. We cannot just let this rumble on because we really are risking people serving notice to hand their contracts back at the end of March because it’s no longer financially viable to continue.

My customers get access to my NHS clients – and plenty more

Lord Darzi published his report in September and three days later we had the second report published by the Institute of Public Policy Research (IPPR). Lord Darzi was also co-chairman of the body that produced the IPPR report.

On the one hand, he published his document outlining all the problems for the NHS. Three days later, the IPPR published the Darzi-supported solutions. The government then jumped on that and said they would produce a new 10-year plan for the NHS, which will be published in the spring.

So we’re waiting on that, and that’s what I mean by the government not really picking the ball up yet. We’ve got no real direction in terms of what they’re going to do, or how they’re going to do it, or where the money’s coming from, which is really disappointing.

At the time of writing, I’m hoping we’ll get an operating framework and a revenue and financial planning guideline published at the end of 2024, which will then give us something to work on in January, February, and March.

I’ll continue my online learner cohort access to my customer base. Not only that, I’ll help them identify and access business-ready customers, we’ll look to build collaborative working projects and supply them with case studies. That will give them a genuine, replicable system and process they can then work with other customers on.

And, of course, we’ll identify and then harness the influence of some real key opinion leaders who can shape what happens within the NHS.

All of that combined will deliver a big commercial return on investment for the companies that either work with me directly or go through the online learning package.

It will be a big year and if you want to know more about the coaching and mentoring packages I offer, you can find out more here.

Scott McKenzie helps pharmaceutical, medical technology and device firms get their products and services in front of the right NHS decision makers. He helped to land no fewer than 53 new projects with the NHS in 2023 alone and has now developed a popular mentorship programme that helps individuals and teams get straight to the heart of the challenges of selling to the NHS. If you want to get your products fully embedded into treatment pathways, Scott can help. Get unprecedented access to key customer insights, proven tools, resources and strategies plus 1-2-1 coaching and decision-maker introductions to finally get your project over the line. Find out more here.