Science and Technology Committee — hearing of 9 June 2026: transcript & video

00:03 - 01:34

Speaker 2

Good morning, welcome to this Select Committee on Science and Technology. We're continuing our inquiry on innovation in the NHS, personalised medicines and AI. We're very pleased to have as our first witness Roland Sinker, who's the former CEO of Cambridge University Hospitals Trust. He was in that post for 10 years and he's the author of the NHS Innovation Ecosystem Review. So, Mr Sinker, we're very pleased to have you here this morning.

You led that Health Innovation Ecosystem Review several years ago, and we would like you to briefly summarise the process relating to that review and its recommendations. And what we're really interested to know is one of the recommendations made by your review is that the NHS should focus on certain areas for innovation rather than trying to do everything at once. Perhaps you could comment on that. And do you feel that innovations related to the NHS ambition to shift to prevention, particularly in personalised medicine and AI, are being prioritised? So perhaps you'd like to start and introduce yourself, but those are the questions to start with.

01:34 - 03:25

Speaker 1

Great, well thank you very much for having me here. Perhaps, Chair, if I start with the first half of the question before we come into the specifics. So the genesis of the innovation ecosystem programme came from three directions. The first was in Cambridge, the interface between our patients and our community, the National Health Service and the care system, our universities, Anglia Ruskin and the University of Cambridge, and a very wide range of life sciences industry partners through to the far end of discovery science in organisations like the Laboratory of Molecular Biology is very strong. And it's in our blood to work together to think about both economic growth and the way that we can improve health and care for our population.

So driver one was how can we get this working better. Driver two, or lens two, we work a lot with national colleagues, leaders of the trade bodies, industry leadership, and it was quite obvious that relationships in 2023 and into 2024 were far scratchier than they'd been in the run-up to and during the COVID-19 pandemic. These are terrific people, outstanding leaders, who individually and with their organisations were doing a fantastic job, but relationships were to say the least very strained. And people were approaching us, me, to say, do you think we could get together and see if we could clear the air and move things forward. And then I was very grateful to Amanda Pritchard and Richard Murley, who was then the chair of NHS England, chief executive and chair, said it's getting quite difficult, would you do a review of the health innovation networks, which were one thin thread of the innovation story.

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