Professor Sir John Bell – President EIT Oxford; Co-CEO, EIT Global
Having recently stepped down from his role as founding Chair of the Oxford Academic Health Partners, Professor Sir John Bell reflects on his pivotal moments at Oxford, the challenges of establishing the city’s academic health partnership, and why a dedicated national health innovation fund could be key to addressing some of the NHS’s toughest challenges.
Throughout his illustrious career, Professor Sir John Bell, former Regius Professor of Medicine at the University of Oxford, has held many senior appointments across government, industry and healthcare. His influence across the sector has been instrumental in developing the UK’s landscape for health and medical research, and he has been a driving force behind Oxford’s success in the medical sciences for many years.
“The thing that resonates with me is getting to the top of the Times Higher Education league tables for medical sciences,” shares Sir John, reflecting on his time as Regius Professor. “At the time, we were the only UK university to get to the top of the tables across the world, and that flowed from 25 years of hard work to build up the medical sciences. It was a real achievement and when it happened for the first time it was pretty special.”
He puts the accolade down to the team of “very special people” across the University, as well as the foundations laid by his predecessors to bring together the right mix of expertise around critical areas of medical research – immunology, genetics of common diseases, epidemiological cohorts, and global health.
“When we started building programmes in global health at Oxford, what we were doing was way ahead of everyone else,” he says. “We were also the first to lean into immunology and inflammation as central to a range of human diseases – we made a bet in that space and it’s been hugely successful.”
But maintaining Oxford’s position in the global rankings is always going to be a challenge. Sir John believes an interdisciplinary outlook, with engineers embedded in the medical sciences and investment in big data analytics, is now a core strength of the University and key to its continuing development.
Ensuring that the big bets pay off requires a certain amount of strategic alignment, so developing partnerships across the University and NHS Trusts played a critical role in winning grants for Oxford’s two parallel NIHR Biomedical Research Centres. “This success is the single biggest achievement of the Oxford Academic Health Partners,” says Sir John, “We had two really good proposals, and while many might ask why Oxford has two BRCs, we’ve worked hard on our ability to coordinate activities together.”
Established with Sir John as founding Chair in 2014, the Oxford Academic Health Partners was set up to align strategic ambitions and objectives across Oxford’s two universities and two NHS Trusts. Its initial goal was to progress estate development plans in an increasingly crowded city and integrate research and healthcare as part of efforts to pioneer new services. And while its approach to streamlining collaboration and research governance is now reaping rewards, getting the big players around the table in the first place was not without its hurdles.
“We have very different organisations with very different objectives, so getting them in a room to talk about shared interests isn’t always straightforward – the credit goes to the institutions for being willing,” explains Sir John.
After taking time to consider potential joint projects, the partnership flourished, particularly where academic and hospital missions overlap. “We’ve matured a lot in terms of our ability to make sure we coordinate activities together, particularly across the NHS Trusts. Our success is facilitated by the fact that the hospitals want to impact community care and public health prevention, and the academics are keen on how to make that happen. We agreed on lots of touch points and saw that we could do things better if we just worked together.”
As one of the architects of Oxford’s innovation ecosystem, Sir John is well known across the wider NHS for his forward-thinking and often candid perspectives on the shape and pace of healthcare innovation – both as an expert Government Advisor and media commentator. Now, in his new role as President of the Ellison Institute of Technology (EIT) Oxford and Co-CEO of EIT Global, Sir John leads work to accelerate the development and adoption of technology to solve humanity’s most enduring challenges. Counting former Prime Minister Tony Blair amongst its faculty, the institute’s innovation agenda extends beyond health, and includes sustainable agriculture, food security, climate change, government innovation, and AI.
“Can you transform some aspects of healthcare by being aggressive with an innovation agenda?” asks Sir John, as he reflects on recent efforts across the NHS to bring down waiting times, tackle social care and refocus around the prevention agenda. “The truth is, the NHS does not do prevention – it’s interested in it, but it won’t pay for it. Shifting to preventative care is a huge opportunity and the best way to manage demand in the acute sector. Research has given us a really good set of tools for prevention, like obesity drugs and vaccines, and we need to get better at using them.
While he thinks that, at one end, the NHS continues to ‘turn the handle’ and hope for change, at the other end, investment in medical research is producing digital tools, therapeutic agents and AI clinical decision aids that are changing the dimensions of healthcare. So how can the NHS translate these into practice? “A pot of money needs to be carved out to test these interventions at scale,” he suggests. “One billion pounds, just 0.5% of the NHS budget, as an innovation fund with regional pilots would help develop a picture of what needs to be done to make a difference across the country across a relatively short period. It’s not an unreasonable ask.”