Cross-sector collaborations between NHS organisations and the research-based pharmaceutical industry have a strong track record of delivering benefits for patients, the NHS and industry – the so-called ‘triple win’.

You can explore the wealth of health system efficiencies and patient benefits gained from these collaborations in the ABPI’s library of cross-sector initiatives.

Despite these successes, we believe the potential of cross-sector partnerships to accelerate health system transformation is still to be realised. Now that England has formally integrated health and care across primary, secondary and social care, it should be possible to make a step change in the scale and ambition of cross-sector collaboration and demonstrate measurable correlations between project interventions and patient outcomes.

The NHS Confederation and ABPI have now been working together with industry and system leaders for seven years to understand and unblock the barriers to making the potential of partnership a reality – exploring issues such as culture, trust and the sheer challenge of stepping outside health system operational norms.

In doing so, we have heard directly what NHS leaders and industry need to work more easily together:

• practical resources and sources of assurance to enable scoping, implementation and reporting across the lifecycle of partnership programmes
• greater understanding by NHS leaders of the regulations governing industry collaboration.

This new guidance aims to meet those needs as the next step in our work together – providing a practical, step-by-step guide to help NHS and industry develop, contract, implement, measure partnerships more easily, and deliver the benefits more rapidly.

Key to this new guidance is the introduction of recommended frameworks, endorsed by both our organisations, that can be used by NHS organisations at all levels – trusts, practices, networks and integrated care systems – to make each stage of partnering straightforward, both for the initial project and for scaling to other locations.

We are indebted to the multiple NHS and industry leaders who gave their time to help us design this guidance and hope that it ushers in an uplift in the scale and ambition of collaboration between our sectors to transform the NHS and improve patient care.

Who this guidance is for

This document is aimed at local NHS organisations in England, industry leaders and those leading on the partnership and transformation agenda within their organisation or system.

Use it to:

• bring stakeholders and partners together to assess priorities for NHS-industry partnership working
• design and implement partnership projects aligned to strategic objectives and informed by the guidance resources
• strengthen assurance and nurture the culture of effective partnership working
• scale existing partnerships across care settings