by Dr Chris Laing, CEO of UCLPartners

This report captures a pivotal year with the launch of our five-year strategy and the start of a new way of working across our partnership.

While an exciting one, this year has seen substantial pressure across our NHS, academic and charity partners. Our health and care system is still suffering from the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, there are backlogs, workforce challenges are considerable and the health and care system is under financial pressure.

We believe that in today’s context, the ability to work in partnership to discover and develop innovation and then deploy it at scale is more critical than ever. 

This year has seen significant developments for us and our partnership. We have, following consultation, approved and launched our new strategy. Our priority themes closely align to those of our integrated care systems (ICSs), as well as to regional and national priorities. And, most importantly, they tackle what data tells us are the biggest drivers of poor health outcomes and health inequalities in our communities.

To deliver on our strategic ambitions, we have developed a new operating model that brings a specialist, integrated approach to managing a pipeline of innovation across our teams. We are working to embed a partnership approach to research, strengthening links with our university and industry partners to source innovation and supporting the building of solutions before testing them to evaluate implementation needs and their real-world impact.

Our work is guided by the health needs of our population, which is one of the reasons why we have spent this past year developing a new insights platform.

We will be working with patients, the public and our health and care system to define problems that need life-changing innovative solutions. We are ensuring that our expertise, effort and energy is spent on work that will deliver the biggest impact.

As we move forwards we are implementing our patient and public involvement and engagement strategy and working ever more closely with our ICSs, welcoming representatives from our three local ICSs and a mental health trust to our board in March 2023. A couple of months later we welcomed Dominic Dodd as our new chair and expressed our gratitude to Richard Murley for his outstanding chairmanship during a period of significant change.

We’d like to thank everyone who has worked with us this year. Together, we will direct focus onto the things that matter most and deliver on our ambitions to positively change the lives of people who need help most.

We are a health innovation partnership.

Our mission is to help five million people from North London to the Essex coast live longer, healthier lives.

We focus on the biggest health challenges our diverse communities are facing, prioritising the people most in need.

We solve health problems through research and innovation and speed up the delivery of solutions that improve health and care.

Recognising the health service collects huge amounts of data, but that more can be done to translate it into actionable insights, we have developed an insights platform that will enable us to better assess, understand and deliver against the health and healthcare needs of our diverse population.

The platform brings together publicly available health and deprivation data across three ICSs – North Central London, North East London and Mid & South Essex. Together, it paints a picture of the health and wellbeing of five million people living from North London to the Essex coast, with a particular focus on our strategic priorities.

For example, through the platform we have seen that almost 20% of people across our region have a main language other than English, most commonly Bengali, Polish, Turkish or Urdu. Also, a fifth of our communities are considered to reside within the lowest deprivation quintile, but the variation between boroughs is significant with 0% of Maldon, but 54% in Barking and Dagenham defined as such. These insights impact how we consider health inequalities in our work.

More than 50 stakeholders helped us to develop and shape the insights platform. It has three purposes:

1. Provide an easy, accessible route to understand population data for our three ICSs, enabling our health and care partners, and indeed anyone who is interested, to ascertain what health challenges the people living in our communities are facing and needing help with.

2. Create an engaging tool to publicly monitor and measure the impact of our work to solve major health challenges through our new five-year strategy.

3. Provide a means to share and contribute learning within our communities.

“North Central London ICS welcomes this new platform which will enrich the insights that we can use to tackle our biggest health challenges from a strong evidence base.”

Sarah Mansuralli, Chief Development and Population Health Officer, North Central London Integrated Care Board.

In the autumn of 2022, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) awarded nearly £166m to the four NIHR Biomedical Research Centres (BRCs) in our partnership. These BRCs, part of our Academic Health Science Centre (AHSC), bring together world-leading expertise to focus on the most pressing health challenges for our population.

Some of their highlights this year include:

NIHR University College London Hospitals BRC identified a new type of MRI scan called VERDICT MRI that can help doctors diagnose prostate cancer more accurately and reduce the number of unnecessary biopsies by 90%.

NIHR Moorfields BRC launched an experimental high-volume diagnostic centre, HERCULES, which targets patients who face lengthy treatment delays and further disease complications. It is estimated that HERCULES could aid detection of 1,100 patients at risk of loss of vision per year.

NIHR Barts BRC established itself as a global reference centre for a new ‘Jenavalve’ technology. This was after successfully treating 15 patients in England with the valve implant that is specifically designed for people living with unmanageable aortic regurgitation.

NIHR Great Ormond Street BRC started a new industry collaboration to design and develop a delivery system for photoreceptor cell patch implants that could enable retinas that are damaged to regenerate, improving a person’s vision.

Cardiovascular disease (CVD) is the most common cause of death in our population and across the UK.

We have developed a suite of resources to help healthcare teams tackle conditions that increase a person’s risk of developing CVD.

One of these resources, our Proactive Care Frameworks, is enabling primary care teams to prioritise care for their highest risk patients and utilise the breadth of their workforce. This year, we have increased the adoption of our frameworks through delivery of the national blood pressure optimisation programme. The framework search tools have been downloaded 16,000 times and incorporated into the Ardens clinical decision support solution. Currently, more than 600 primary care networks (PCNs) are using our frameworks, benefiting thousands of patients across the country.

As a local example, 113 practices across Barking, Havering and Redbridge have started to use our proactive care framework that seeks to boost the management of atrial fibrillation as a CVD risk factor. As a result of this, 314 patients have started to receive anticoagulants and 2,609 patients have been identified for statins.

We are building upon the success of our award-winning frameworks with a new CVDACTION resource, which we have developed to complement the widely adopted CVDPREVENT tool.

CVDPREVENT utilises routinely held GP data to help primary care teams understand how many people with CVD, or risk of CVD, are potentially undiagnosed or sub-optimally treated within their geography. CVDACTION enables GP practices to act on CVDPREVENT data by identifying the individual patients at highest risk.

We are implementing and evaluating CVDACTION across all five London ICSs. A further three pilots are taking place outside of London; NHS England will support two of these sites and we will support one in Mid and South Essex. Evaluation of impact is expected in late 2024.

We have also continued our work to support getting patients with high cholesterol onto medications that are proven to reduce their risk of CVD. This year, 143,928 patients have been prescribed Ezetimibe and 458 have been put onto PCSK9i as a result of our work.

“The work done in Havering North (in implementing the UCLPartners frameworks) has had real impact on not only the patients, many of whom have had their hypertension brought under control, but also the colleagues across the PCN who have found this new way of working incredibly valuable.”

Dr Ann Baldwin, programme lead for five PCNs across Barking, Havering and Redbridge and Havering North PCN clinical lead

Climate change poses a significant threat to physical and mental health. Our NHS feels the strain of these health implications, yet it is also a key contributor to them, responsible for 4-5% of England’s carbon emissions. National targets dictate all NHS trusts must reduce their direct carbon emissions by a minimum of 80% by 2032 and achieve net zero by 2040.

This year, we launched our Climate Collaborative, working closely with our NHS partners to identify and address blockers for their net zero ambitions. Through our engagement we identified three key areas where we can support the application of research and innovation to accelerate progress toward decarbonising the NHS.

These form the pillars of our Climate Collaborative strategy and are:

1. closing the research evidence gap through closer collaboration between our university and NHS partners,

2. reducing energy demand and greening its supply,

3. building capacity and confidence to improve carbon-based decision-making and embed sustainable change in practices.

Focusing in on pillar one of our Climate Collaborative strategy, our Connecting for Change project has created more opportunities for academic and health collaboration. Through a series of ‘sandpit’ events we brought together more than 30 people with varied expertise, challenging them to work together and propose ways we could reduce carbon emissions associated with the NHS estate and the relationship between buildings and clinical pathways. From this process, we will fund a number of collaborative novel research projects that will provide actionable evidence for removing the barriers to rapid decarbonisation.

We want our work to have the biggest positive impact on the health and care of our population, helping those who are most in need and reducing inequalities.

We strive to become a more diverse and inclusive organisation. Our Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) working group, formed of UCLPartners staff working across the organisation in a range of capacities, helps to steer our work to become a more inclusive and diverse organisation.

We are also committed to creating inclusive patient and public engagement opportunities for people from diverse backgrounds and experiences to share their insights and actively shape our work.

This year, we set up our Patient, Carer and Public Advisory Panel – a diverse group of 24 individuals who feed into and influence decision-making at UCLPartners. We are also growing a broader network of patients, carers and public contributors, known as the Lived Experience Network, who share their views and knowledge, working with projects from across our area to make sure that we are tackling the biggest health challenges and developing solutions that work. 

Our newly formed Environmental, Social and Governance (ESG) group, brings people from across our organisation together with the united goal of setting our standards for measuring and improving our impact on society and the environment. As part of this work, we have started measuring our carbon footprint as an organisation, with the aim of establishing 2022/23 as a baseline so that we can set out a plan for reducing our carbon footprint in subsequent years.

“By working with communities we can gather in-depth information, find new voices and connect with new ideas to work together for better health services and healthier lives.”

Dele Oladeji, UCLPartners patient, carer and public panel member