The University of Birmingham and University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust announce a groundbreaking joint working agreement to be known as Birmingham Health Partners (BHP).
Duration: 04.05 mins
Speaker
Professor Charlie Craddock, Transitional Director, Birmingham Health Partners
Transcript
In the last fifty years since Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA, it’s become clear that remarkable advances in our understanding of the biology of disease, inform the design of new and effective therapies and never has this been more true in the last decade. So it’s now clear that to deliver world class clinical care you need a close interaction between high quality clinical teams and outstanding scientific teams. And so the development of the Birmingham Health Partners is a visionary initiative that will combine the unique strategic strengths within Birmingham.
The links that currently exist between the University of Birmingham and Queen Elizabeth Hospital will be strengthened by this imitative in a number of ways. The first is that it will increase the access of patients within the whole of the West Midlands catchment area to new and effective therapies and that’s going to occur because you get very strong clinical teams working closely with the world class trials units based in the university. The second thing is we are going to be working to improve diagnostic systems and thirdly, to embed important new advances in information technology so that we can assess and understand more accurately patients’ response to therapies. So if you put those together you get, because of the interaction between the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and the University of Birmingham, a uniquely effective strategy for delivering world class healthcare.
As a result of the interactions between the Centre for Clinical Haematology and scientific teams in the University of Birmingham, we’ve been able to deliver approximately £50 million worth of new drug and transplant therapies to patients with high risk leukaemia. So that’s the delivery of potentially life saving therapies, through clinical trials, which patients wouldn’t otherwise have seen. And looking more broadly at the interactions between the university and the Queen Elizabeth Hospital, you can see that in the area of health economics, in the areas of clinical trial design and in the areas of information technology, by working together both of these organisations have specifically improved the delivery and assessment of patient care.
There are very few places within Europe that have the strategic advantages that Birmingham has in the delivery of translational medicine. So this is an area of enormous economic importance. The bio-pharmaceutical and bio-technology industries are very keen when they develop new drugs and new therapies to assess their impact on patients as quickly as possible and to the highest possible level. And if you talk with the pharmaceutical industry, one of the big unmet needs internationally is the identification of clinical trials programmes that can assess new therapies rapidly and effectively. Across the world there are very few places that are as well blessed as Birmingham is, sitting at the heart of one of the largest catchment regions in Europe and working closely with an outstanding clinical centre at the Queen Elizabeth Hospital and internationally competitive scientific teams at the University of Birmingham.
End of recording