Dr Katherine Boylan Director of Innovation, Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust
Healthcare Partnerships
Right partnerships key to mutual wins for healthcare and industry
Manchester hospital aims to be the UK’s leading NHS trust for innovation and the healthcare innovation partner of choice for industry.
Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT) is one of the largest and most specialist NHS providers in England, delivering hospital and community services to almost one million people.
Innovation at MFT has multiple touchpoints with industry, and activity relies on partnership with the commercial sector — from licensing opportunities for homegrown intellectual property by supporting our industry partners’ evidence needs and working hand in glove to introduce technologies into routine use.
Europe’s largest clinical academic campus MFT is home to Europe’s largest clinical academic campus, delivered through a first-of-its-kind joint venture with a commercial partner, harnessing the power of place to serve the needs of local companies (large and small) and the Trust.
We know the key factors for success when developing meaningful cross-sector relationships, learnt though both very successful and less successful collaborations, but all informing our learning. Essential to everything is identifying the right partner — a company that shares our beliefs and values but also provides a solution that aligns with a local need or challenge. Proactive
demand signalling rather than reacting to incoming approaches is key.
With the right partnerships, the potential mutual wins will be evident upfront and driven by a joint desire to deliver benefit for both sides. This might be financial (NHS), commercial (company) or reputational (both), and it’s shortsighted to consider only economic benefits.
Use case: Medtronic and MFT
In a partnership formalised through a strategic agreement in 2025, colleagues from MFT and Medtronic meet in monthly touchpoints that identify, progress and monitor ongoing collaborative projects.
In one example, we’ve undertaken a project evaluating the Medtronic/Corsano wearable device for monitoring of immunocompromised patients — work to expand it into other use cases is ongoing. Key to the success is the alignment between the MFT’s population needs and the strategic driver to deliver technologyenabled care, and Medtronic’s corporate mission of supporting health through innovative biomedical engineering. In the wearables example, the alignment with UK Government policy around the “big bet” technologies is a win-win!
How strategic partnerships can reduce pressure on the NHS
Partnership is essential to improving population health and, in turn, helping reduce pressure on the NHS.
Many forces that determine people’s health, including housing, social care and finances, sit beyond the power of clinicians or the confines of a hospital. While the NHS can treat people who fall ill, preventing ill health, frequent GP appointments and hospital admissions requires others to act too.
Why partner engagement is important
It’s critical that the NHS engages with the full range of partners with the power to improve health outcomes. The network of groups and institutions with a role to play is broader than many realise. Key players are mayors and their strategic authorities.
Devolution has led to the creation of more elected mayors with additional powers to help determine population health. With growing responsibility for transport, housing and economic development, these mayors and devolved authorities will continue to be key partners for the NHS. Ensuring local growth, health and industrial strategies align is an opportunity to improve outcomes more effectively and efficiently.
However, partnerships shouldn’t be limited to larger entities. NHS organisations should also look to engage with partners at every level of society, from football clubs to schools, universities, libraries and even hairdressers and barbershops.
A top-down uniform model of public services is increasingly resulting in reforms based on local needs and wants from the bottom up. This approach provides opportunities for a broader range of partnerships, but also greater efficiency in how services are delivered to local people.
Pride in Place
Central to this shift is Pride in Place, led by the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government, which is the government’s flagship strategy for communityled regeneration. Around 380 of the most deprived neighbourhoods will receive £20 million each over the next 10 years. This is a significant opportunity to make preventative healthcare in communities a reality and something NHS organisations would do well to embrace.
Reducing pressure on NHS services sustainably depends on partnerships. Uniting us are the communities we serve, and by collaborating for and with these communities, we improve population health for everyone’s benefit.
Christopher George Health Economics Policy Advisor, NHS Confederation
Transformational fatigue emerges when innovation outpaces a system’s capacity to absorb it.
Transforming without burning out: why the NHS needs partners who can help deliver change
The NHS isn’t short of innovation, as new technologies, care models and national priorities arrive at pace. The challenge is absorption: turning ideas into reliable, everyday practice in a system under intense operational pressure, driving transformational fatigue.
Dr Matthew Williams-Gray Senior Director and Country Lead Medtronic, Enterprise Accounts and Integrated Health Solutions, UK & Ireland
Hospitals and university health centres are repeatedly asked to improve productivity, adopt digital tools, integrate AI and redesign services, often within the same infrastructure and workforce constraints.
When the pace of change outstrips the time and capacity available to deliver it well, transformation can start to feel like a burden rather than a route to improvement. Each institution is often tasked with transformation in isolation. In reality, similar tasks are being undertaken across multiple hospitals and systems.
Industry partnerships can help; they build confidence and reduce the feeling of burden among NHS staff and healthcare professionals, making change feel more manageable.
What does an effective partnership look like?
First, it means shared delivery, not transactional supply. A partner, like Medtronic Integrated Health Solutions (IHS), can provide practical implementation support to reassure NHS staff and providers that change is manageable without destabilising day-to-day care.
Second, it means bringing experience from across systems. Many organisations face similar operational constraints: bottlenecks in flow, workforce shortages, elective backlogs and the complexity of running ‘old’ and ‘new’ models in parallel.
Yet healthcare often must relearn the same lessons because insights remain local. Partners who work across multiple settings can bring pattern recognition and implementation learning that helps organisations move faster without pretending there’s a one-size-fits-all answer.
These pressures show up across different innovations, and the deciding factor is rarely the technology itself but whether the system has the support to implement it without adding to the burden on already stretched teams.
with hundreds of hospitals.
At Manchester University NHS Foundation Trust (MFT), wearable technology such as Corsano is being evaluated in post operative monitoring pathways as part of a broader effort to redesign how patients are monitored and supported. The value comes from embedding it in a workable pathway to reduce manual workload and strengthen patient oversight, rather than creating yet another task for staff.
This challenge also appears in diagnostics. PillCam™ can shift certain patient cohorts into different diagnostic pathways and help relieve pressure on constrained services. But transformation fatigue grows when organisations must keep legacy pathways running for some patient cohorts while building and operating new care models in parallel for others. Partnership helps teams plan the transition, manage risk and implement change to reduce pressure rather than creating a second system to run.
In areas such as robotics, the lesson is similar. Sustainable adoption depends on long-term capability building through training models, service redesign and implementation support, not simply introducing equipment.
AI part of the same story There’s growing pressure to ‘use AI,’ but only a narrow set of applications will deliver meaningful value in real pathways. AI must remove friction and reduce workload, not overcomplicate and add steps.
AI’s greatest value in healthcare might not be in clinical decision-making, but as a learning infrastructure. It can help combat transformation fatigue by processing large volumes of fragmented data and qualitative operational materials to identify patterns across institutions that humans might miss.
Paid for by Medtronic
Other industries, like aerospace, automotive, digital and telecommunications, adopted a transformational agenda by identifying modular building blocks of transformation that are repeatable across systems and can be deployed at an industrial scale. Healthcare needs to adopt a similar approach to redefine care pathways. IHS exemplifies this role, having developed a modular transformation architecture through partnerships
Transformational fatigue emerges when innovation outpaces a system’s capacity to absorb it. Addressing that gap requires more than ambition — it requires partnership.
Increasingly, the NHS organisations best placed to sustain change are those that recognise they cannot, and arguably should not, do it alone. By working with partners who bring experience, implementation capability and pan-system learning, they make transformation feel achievable rather than overwhelming and turn innovation into lasting impact.