The impact of the last few years, combined with the current pressures, means NHS staff are feeling less able to take on the important work they do over and above their day-to-day duties. One consultant described it as “massive clinical inertia”, “you can feel the ambition leaking out of people”.

This has significant implications for Pharma. If you’re introducing new treatments, helping to improve pathways, supporting the establishment of new clinics, they all require additional work by healthcare professionals to make them happen. Work they simply might not feel capable of taking on at this time. “People don’t have the bandwidth” is how another consultant described it.

What can you do?

You need to make sure the activities you plan for this year fit with the pressures people are under and their potential lack of capacity/desire to take on additional work.

One interviewee suggested only focusing on those projects that can deliver high impact for the healthcare system, but which require limited input from the HCPs involved.

This may not be possible for every project, but the idea of prioritising ‘high impact/low resource’ activities is a good approach to any future collaborative work.

It is also worth considering how you can make HCPs’ lives easier. Simplification – of solutions, materials, data – all save people time and help to ensure any additional work is less onerous.

These insights are compiled from interviews conducted in December 2022 with a range of NHS healthcare professionals working in secondary and tertiary care (including nurses, consultants and pharmacists).

They will hopefully help to inform how people working in Pharma can engage with the NHS in 2023.