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Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber CEO Richard Stubbs has welcomed the recommendations of the NHS Productivity Commission, which call for a bigger focus on innovation to achieve better health outcomes and patient experience.

Richard sat on the Commission’s expert advisory panel and helped shape its findings. He said the report’s call for a “faster route from innovation to routine practice” reflected exactly the kind of work health innovation networks (HINs) were set up to do.

The Commission, established by the Health Foundation and co-chaired by Anita Charlesworth and Tera Allas, published its final report, Breaking the cycle: how to build a more productive NHS, alongside four detailed policy options papers covering workforce, capital, technology and innovation, and transformation.

The report concludes that the NHS is “not set up to deliver sustained productivity growth” and sets out a package of reforms designed to give the health service greater stability, clearer accountability, more freedom and stronger long-term capability to improve care – rather than relying on short-term initiatives or the goodwill of exceptional staff.

Among its central findings, the Commission argues that if the NHS in England matched the outcomes of the best-performing comparable health systems, without spending any more each year, it could prevent between 18,500 and 20,600 deaths annually from treatable causes and add 2.5 to 4.5 years of good health to people’s lives on average.

A bigger job for health innovation networks

The technology and innovation policy options paper, authored by commissioners Matthew Bell and Catherine Davies, recommends that the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) should directly commission and fund health innovation networks to provide stronger “demand signalling” – working with NHS regions to set out clear regional priorities for innovation, backed by real contracting and funding commitments, so that suppliers and investors have the confidence to bring new solutions to the NHS.

The paper also recommends pooling commercial expertise “within or alongside” HINs, so that providers across a region can draw on specialist negotiation, procurement and market-engagement skills without every organisation having to build that capability from scratch.

Richard said the recommendations recognised a gap that health innovation networks deal with every day.

“For years, we’ve seen brilliant innovations developed in the NHS or by industry partners struggle to move from a single successful trial into everyday use across the system,” he said.

“This report is honest about why that happens – short-term funding, unclear priorities and a lack of the commercial and analytical capability needed to make the case for scaling something up. Giving health innovation networks a clearer mandate, proper funding and a seat at the table for shaping regional priorities is exactly the right response.

“We already work closely with NHS organisations, industry and academia across Yorkshire and the Humber to identify what patients and staff need and to help good ideas spread faster.

“What this Commission is proposing would let us do more of that, more consistently, and with the backing to make it stick.”

Wider productivity recommendations

Beyond technology and innovation, the Commission’s recommendations span:

• Workforce – making staff engagement a core board-level performance indicator and establishing regional workforce development hubs.
• Capital – giving NHS providers greater multi-year flexibility over capital spending and reviewing capital charges.
• Transformation – moving to three-year financial settlements, reducing regulatory burden through a new “office for NHS simplification”, and giving elected mayors and combined authority leaders formal sign-off over system financial plans.

On technology specifically, the report calls for a new national data strategy, faster progress towards a single patient record, and a “test-and-learn” approach that would allow the NHS to trial emerging technologies – including AI – under controlled conditions before scaling what works.

Richard welcomed the report’s broader emphasis on giving regions more say in how innovation and improvement are delivered, noting the direct relevance to the North of England’s devolution agenda.

“Yorkshire and Humber has real strengths to offer here – from our work with the region’s mayors and combined authorities through to the innovation ecosystem we’ve built with universities, NHS trusts and industry,” he said.

“This report makes the case that regions, not just the centre, need the tools and the trust to drive productivity. We’re ready to play our part.”

About the Commission

The NHS Productivity Commission’s eight commissioners – John Hall and Richard Murray (capital), Habib Naqvi and James Buchan (workforce), Catherine Davies and Matthew Bell (technology and innovation), and Ben Gershlick and Rachel Wolf (transformation) – worked in pairs to produce the four policy options papers, supported by a secretariat and an expert advisory panel that included Richard Stubbs.

The final report and policy options papers are published in full at www.health.org.uk/nhs-productivity-commission.