Health Tech Manifesto Commitments

We now have manifestos for the three main parties. We’ve summarised their commitments on health tech below.

Labour

Labour’s mission is to build an NHS fit for the future. Most of the health commitments have been trailed already.

“Labour’s reforms will shift our NHS away from a model geared towards late diagnosis and treatment, to a model where more services are delivered in local communities. We will harness the power of technologies like AI to transform the speed and accuracy of diagnostic services, saving potentially thousands of lives. And we will embed a greater focus on prevention throughout the entire healthcare system and supporting services”.

The commitments relating to health tech are set out below.

Labour will:

  • Introduce a new ‘Fit For the Future’ fund to double the number of CT and MRI scanners, allowing the NHS to catch cancer and other conditions earlier, saving lives.
  • Develop an NHS innovation and adoption strategy in England. This will include a plan for procurement, giving a clearer route to get products into the NHS coupled with reformed incentive structures to drive innovation and faster regulatory approval for new technology and medicines.
  • Maximise our potential to lead the world in clinical trials. This means making the process more efficient and accessible, by speeding up recruitment and giving more people a chance to participate through the NHS app.
  • Transform the NHS app, putting patients in control of their own health to better manage their medicine, appointments, and health needs.
  • Digitise the Red Book record of children’s health, improving support for new families.

Conservatives

The Conservatives have set out a plan to deliver better health and social care. Their manifesto says they will invest in and modernise the NHS. It’s difficult to read this without wondering why this hasn’t happened already, acknowledging we have been living in difficult times.

To transform NHS technology and productivity, the Conservatives will invest £3.4 billion in new technology to transform the NHS for staff and for patients. The NHS Productivity Plan will see NHS productivity grow by 1.9% a year from 2025-26 – unlocking £35 billion of cumulative savings by the end of the decade.

In relation to health technology, the Conservatives will:

  • Make the NHS App the single front door for NHS services. Patients will use the App to access their medical records, order prescriptions, book vaccine appointments, access a digital red book and manage their hospital appointments.
  • Use AI to free up doctors’ and nurses’ time for frontline patient care.
  • Replace tens of thousands of outdated computers, slashing the 13 million hours in doctors’ and nurses’ time lost to IT issues every year and digitise NHS processes through the Federated Data Platform.
  • Fund technology to help clinicians read MRI and CT scans more quickly and accurately, speeding up results for 130,000 patients every year.
  • The Conservatives will implement a new MedTech pathway so that cost-effective MedTech, including AI, is rapidly adopted throughout the NHS.
  • The Conservatives will roll out new digital health checks to 250,000 more people every year, helping to prevent hundreds of strokes and heart attacks.

Liberal Democrats

On health, the Lib Dems say they “believe that people should be in control of their own lives and health and that means everyone should get the care they need, when they need it, where they need it. Instead of just spending money firefighting crisis after crisis, we will invest now to save taxpayers’ money in the long-run. We will strengthen patients’ rights, fix crumbling hospitals, recruit and retain a workforce for the future, invest in technology that improves outcomes and saves money, and restore the UK as a world leader in health research”.

The Lib Dem commitments relating to health tech are set out below.

Help people spend more years of their life in good health by:

  • Introducing a new kitemark for health apps and digital tools that are clinically proven to help people lead healthier lives.

Harness the benefits of new technology and digital tools for patients by:

  • Ring-fencing budgets to enable the NHS to adopt innovative digital tools that improve patient care and experience and save staff time and costs.
  • Replacing old, slow computers to free up clinicians’ time to care for patients.
  • Requiring all IT systems used by the NHS to work with each other.
  • Ensuring every care setting has electronic records that can feed into a patient’s health record with the patient’s consent.
  • Expanding virtual wards and investing in new technologies that free up staff time and allow people to be treated at or closer to home