I beg to move,
That this House has considered medical technology regulations and the NHS.
It is a great pleasure to serve under your chairmanship, Sir Gary, and to talk about the importance of medical innovation and medical technology in our NHS. We know that the NHS faces significant challenges, but medical technology—or health tech, as it is often called—holds many of the solutions that are necessary to achieve things such as delivering improved patient outcomes and facilitating the transition to more sustainable models of health and care delivery. It also has massive potential to drive economic growth.
Health tech includes everything from laboratory tests to wound care dressings, mental health apps, implantable defibrillators and critical technology—everything that is absolutely fundamental to the diagnosis and treatment of health conditions. Life-saving and life-enhancing health technologies, such as cardiac pacemakers and artificial knees and hips, are already highly regulated products. While we were part of the EU, UK-based health tech was subject to CE marking, but now there is a need to develop sovereign regulatory arrangements that provide equal levels of patient safety while protecting timely access to global life-saving and life-enhancing health technologies.
The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency is solely responsible for regulating the UK’s medical devices market and is mandated to ensure that patient safety is protected, irrespective of where a product is manufactured. The MHRA has a huge responsibility on its shoulders, and it is for that reason that I welcome the Chancellor’s commitment in the spring Budget to reform regulations around medicines and medical technologies. In fact, that was the thrust of why I asked for this debate, so it is lovely to be able to welcome that announcement rather than to be pushing for it. It is a much more comfortable position for me to be in.
The Chancellor confirmed that the MHRA will receive £10 million of extra funding over two years to maximise its use of Brexit freedoms and accelerate patient access to treatments. He also confirmed that the MHRA is moving to a new model, which will allow near automatic sign-off for medicines and technologies that have already been approved by trusted international partners in places such as the USA, Japan and Europe. That is important, because the US Food and Drug Administration—the FDA—is recognised as delivering high-quality, innovative health tech to its citizens in a timely manner while maintaining high standards of patient safety. Those product regulation-equivalent routes, which recognise the decisions of trusted jurisdictions that have already looked at medicines and technologies very carefully, can protect NHS patients’ access to high-quality products and allow our own regulator to focus resources on where they can make the most impact.