The Pharmaceutical Journal
Vol 269 No 7215 p354
14 September 2002

This article
Reprint
Photocopy

News summary

NHS to keep profits from inventions

National Health Service trusts are to be allowed to form companies with external investors to exploit inventions and ideas developed by NHS employees and primary care contractors and their staff.

Announcing legal powers which came into force on 9 September, Lord Hunt, Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State for Health, said: "For far too long now, the NHS has seen too many of its bright ideas taken and exploited by the private sector. ... The income which trusts will generate will be retained and ploughed back into patient care and the staff with the original idea will also personally benefit."

The law change means that the NHS will be able to spin off companies in the same way that universities do in order to develop their staff's ideas. Before they do so, trusts will have to submit business plans to the Department of Health and gain approval.

The Department says that the inability of the NHS to do this in the past has meant that it has missed out on millions of pounds of potential income because private companies have gone on to make profits from drugs and equipment originally created by NHS staff.

Until now, the NHS has only benefited from new intellectual property derived from its research and development schemes. Now it will gain from ideas and inventions generated by all NHS employees involved in health care. NHS organisations will be expected to restrict their investment in any schemes to the ideas themselves.

The new legal power is accompanied by fresh guidance on the exploitation of intellectual property, which makes it clear that the NHS intends to benefit from ideas and inventions generated by the primary care contractor professions, as well as its direct employees.

"The NHS as an innovative organisation: a framework and guidance on the management of intellectual property in the NHS" is available on the internet at www.innovations.nhs.uk