Latest news with #AraDarzi
Time Magazine
08-05-2025
- Health
- Time Magazine
Ara Darzi
Honorary consultant surgeon at Imperial College Hospital NHS Trust, Ara Darzi, was commissioned by the British government to review the state of the National Health Service. What he found was damning: crumbling facilities, equipment shortages, chronically long waits for treatment and outdated technology. His final report, released in September 2024, exposed one of the country's most respected institutions as a failing system stretched beyond its limits by a huge surge in demand from Britain's aging population. The capacity of the health service was 'degraded by disastrous management reforms,' Darzi wrote, while the trust and good will of many frontline staff has been lost. The report sparked a public outcry and a renewed commitment by the government to modernize and improve the vital health service. Darzi's review pointed to a number of factors to explain the decline in the health service: too much austerity in the 2010s, weak capital investment, and mismanagement. His insights are now being used to push for reform, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer promising a 10 year plan to reimagine the NHS, focusing on digitizing the organization and committing more investment to preventative care and community health services. Darzi has also called for setting government health targets, like increasing healthy life expectancy by 10 years by 2055, incentivizing businesses to prioritize healthier products, and greater investments in children's health. 'There is no path to either wellbeing or growth without prioritising health,' he says. 'That is a powerful platform for sustained, ambitious action by the new government.'
Medscape
07-05-2025
- Health
- Medscape
Over 1000 GP Surgeries to Receive Modernisation Funding
More than 1000 GP surgeries across England will receive government funding to upgrade outdated premises and boost patient access, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) has announced. The £102 million investment for 2025-2026 will be delivered through the Primary Care Utilisation and Modernisation Fund. The fund was announced during the 2024 Spending Review. The initiative aims to increase capacity, support the workforce, and enable over eight million additional appointments, the DHSC said. Many Premises "Unfit for Purpose" An independent report by Lord Ara Darzi last year found that outdated, inefficient buildings created barriers to delivering high-quality patient care and reduced staff productivity. The NHS Confederation reported that a fifth of GP estates pre-dated the NHS, while half were more than 30 years old. 'Our last survey of members found that two in five GPs considered their premises unfit for purpose,' said Professor Kamila Hawthorne, chair of the Royal College of GPs, in a statement. 'Nearly 90% of respondents said their practice did not have enough consulting rooms, and three-quarters did not have enough space to take on additional GP trainees,' she said. Simple Fixes, Greater Impact Health and Social Care Secretary Wes Streeting described the changes as 'simple fixes', such as converting unused offices into consulting rooms and creating new clinical spaces. A BMJ Open study published last year found that over the course of 10 years – 2013 to 2023 – the number of NHS general practices fell by 20% from 8044 to 6419. In the same period, the average practice list size increased by 40% from 6967 to 9724 patients. The Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC) said many surgeries could see more patients if they had adequate space and facilities. 'Turning Point' Ruth Rankine, primary care director at the NHS Confederation, said the lack of investment in estates had blocked improvements in productivity and care delivery. 'If we are serious about shifting care from hospital to community, from sickness to prevention, and from analogue to digital, then sustained investment in primary and community estates, equipment and technology is vital,' she said. In a statement, Darzi said the investment marked 'a crucial turning point' in addressing the long-standing issue of a primary care estate that is 'simply not fit for purpose'. Dr Amanda Doyle, national director for primary care and community services, emphasised the need to improve facilities to enhance patient experience and support workforce recruitment and retention. Projects are due to be delivered during the 2025 to 2026 financial year, with the first upgrades expected to begin this summer, according to the DHSC.
The Guardian
19-03-2025
- Business
- The Guardian
Peer who led government NHS review failed to declare shares in health firms
The independent peer Lord Darzi, a senior adviser to the government on the NHS, failed to officially declare shareholdings in healthcare companies worth hundreds of thousands of pounds. Ara Darzi is an eminent surgeon and professor at Imperial College London whose report on the NHS for the government in September informed the decision announced last week by the health secretary, Wes Streeting, to abolish NHS England. Darzi also has an extensive portfolio of private interests in commercial medical companies. A Guardian investigation has found Darzi held shares and share options in four healthcare companies that he did not declare on his House of Lords register of interests. The information was missing from the register when Streeting appointed him to lead the investigation into the state of the health service. Lawyers for Darzi said the omission was an 'oversight', and that some of the information had been publicly available in US stock market filings. They said he had written to the registrar of Lords interests to request his entry be corrected. The undeclared interests include $500,000 of shares and $800,000 of share options in Evelo Biosciences, a US-based healthcare venture where Darzi was a director. The shares were bought in 2022 and Darzi held them until June 2023, according to his now corrected register. Darzi's lawyers said he had never obtained benefit from the share options as he never converted them into shares. The Lords rules require peers, as lifelong members of the UK parliament, to be transparent about their commercial interests. Until September 2023, all shares or share options worth more than £50,000 were declarable. The threshold then rose to £100,000. Darzi's share options in Evelo were above the registrable value for five years, from the start of his directorship in 2018, when his first remuneration package was $27,438 in fees, and $458,202 in share options, to June 2023 when he says his interest ended. Darzi resigned from the Evelo board in 2022, and the company went into liquidation last year. Evelo was a start-up backed by a US venture capital group, Flagship Pioneering, where Darzi has a paid role as chair of the 'health security initiative' of its UK arm. Flagship was an early backer of Moderna, which became a multibillion-dollar company after its Covid vaccine sold around the world. Darzi declares on the register that he is a director at three other companies backed by Flagship: Montai Health Inc, a molecular nutrition company; Harbinger Health, focusing on early cancer detection; and YourBio Health Inc, which has created a blood testing device that can be sold direct to the public. Unlike Evelo, these companies are not listed on any stock market, which means details about shareholders are not publicly available. Asked whether he had a financial interest in the three companies, lawyers for Darzi said he did. They said he held share options in all three companies above the £100,000 registrable value, and a holding of shares in Montai Health Inc since January 2022, also above the value requiring them to be registered. Share options give the holder the right to buy shares at a fixed price, and are usually converted into shares by the holder when their value rises above the fixed price. Dr Jonathan Rose, a political integrity expert at De Montfort University, said: 'Breaches of the rules are corrosive to the trust that the public should be able to have in parliament. Given that the House of Lords specifically wants people with outside interests to use their knowledge for the public good, and given that people are appointed for life and can't be removed by elections, it is critical that the rules are followed in full.' Darzi was appointed to the Lords and made a junior health minister by Gordon Brown in 2007. He led a review of the NHS for the Labour government at that time. Darzi was a non-executive director of NHS England from 2020 to 2022, and he currently chairs the NHS Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC), which negotiates deals with healthcare and life science businesses. His 'rapid investigation' into the NHS for Streeting produced a report in September that found the NHS to be in 'serious trouble', and was highly critical of the Conservative government's years of austerity and the 2012 reorganisation which produced NHS England. The report recommended a series of changes, including a 'major tilt towards technology', saying: 'There is enormous potential … for life sciences breakthroughs to create new treatments.' Darzi's lawyers told the Guardian the AAC role was explicitly a collaboration between the NHS and the life sciences industry, and he did not have a conflict of interest between his public roles and his directorships and share interests in private healthcare businesses. They disclosed he took a 'leave of absence' from his paid role at Flagship Pioneering while he led the NHS review. They said: 'Before accepting the appointment … our client disclosed his personal interests to [Streeting] (by sharing his House of Lords register of interests) and took a leave of absence from his position at Flagship while he was undertaking the NHS investigation and was not paid during this time. This was entirely at our client's own behest and specifically to ensure that there could be no perceived conflict of interest.' A Department of Health and Social Care spokesperson said: 'Lord Darzi is a world-renowned cancer surgeon who has dedicated more than three decades of his life to the NHS and medical innovation. 'All relevant due diligence processes were followed.' Darzi's lawyers said he had not realised peers were required to register share options, and that his failure to do so was 'an oversight'. He acknowledged that he should have declared them, and his shareholding in Montai. 'Lord Darzi has devoted his life to the advancement of medicine and scientific discovery, and over the course of this he has worked both with government and industry to improve the health system and support the life sciences sectors in this country. He has gone to great lengths to ensure that there have not been conflicts of interests, perceived or otherwise,' the lawyers said. 'It has recently been brought to Lord Darzi's attention that the share options he was granted as part of his role as director of Evelo, Montai Therapeutics, Harbinger Health and YourBio Health and his subsequent personal investment to support Evelo and Montai Therapeutics's scientific research exceeded the reportable threshold for the House of Lords register. He has acted immediately to rectify this oversight and update the entry on the register. Lord Darzi is very grateful to the Guardian for helping bring this oversight to light.'
