NEWS
Policy and politics
Harwell granted special life sciences status Harwell Science and Innovation Campus in Oxfordshire has been designated as a Life Sciences Opportunity Zone by the Office for Life Sciences. Introduced in 2016, through the Life Sciences Sector Deal, the government has created a small number of specially designated ‘zones’ in the UK with the purpose of promoting UK life sciences capabilities. Harwell will be given this title for a 10-year period and is one of only seven locations in the UK to receive such status. The government will work with Harwell campus to attract national and foreign investment, establish trade agreements and promote the campus as a location for start-ups. Harwell is a 700-acre campus home to 6,000 people across 200 organisations and also home to the HealthTec Cluster which is centred
around £2 billion of open access National Physical Laboratories. These include the Diamond Light Source, ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, Central Laser Facility, as well as new the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre and Rosalind Franklin Institute. Research and commercial work on Harwell campus spans everything from drug discovery, including fragment screening, artificial intelligence-enhanced drug design, vaccines, advanced medicines, through to environmental impacts on human health, biomaterials and ageing. The news comes a week after the government’s launch of the Nucleic Acid Therapies Accelerator (NATA) and the new Extreme Photonics Applications Centre (EPAC), both at Harwell. NATA leads research in delivering medicines that target untreatable
diseases, including Parkinson’s, Huntingdon’s and cancer. EPAC will be a new advanced imaging centre, housing lasers that produce 3D X-rays in just 40 seconds. Harwell Campus is expanding via a private public partnership between Harwell Oxford Partners and U+I, plus two government backed agencies, the Science and Technology Facilities Council (UKRISTFC) and the UK Atomic Energy Authority. Nadhim Zahawi, life sciences minister, said: “The UK is home to one of the strongest, most vibrant health and life science industries globally, with discoveries and improvements in health diagnosis transforming people’s lives. Collaboration is vital to growing this sector.” Adrian Hill, STFC-UKRI lead for the HealthTec Cluster at Harwell,
commented: “The campus continues to evolve in order to meet the nation’s technological and health challenges. The Life Sciences Opportunity Zone designation will be a key driver for future growth in Oxfordshire and along the M4 corridor, creating jobs and contributing to UK GDP.” Gordon Duncan, a partner at Harwell Science and Innovation Campus, said: “The life sciences industry contributes over £70 billion per annum to the UK economy and provides 240,000 jobs. Harwell Campus plays an increasingly important role at the centre of this sector. We have a unique platform here to help accelerate research and innovation around the country, taking applied research and turning it into commercial outputs using state of the art technologies and applications – this is unparalleled across Europe.”
The government must have “legal responsibility” to ensure there are enough nurses to provide safe and effective care to all patients, according to Mike Adams, director for England at the Royal College of Nursing (RCN). Adams made the comments in reference to a Commons debate led by Labour MP Mohammad Yasin, who stressed the negative impact the nursing workforce crisis is having on patient safety and staff morale. Yasin, the MP for Bedford, called on the government to address this and take urgent action to fix nursing staff shortages. Throughout the debate MPs focused on the detrimental effect low staffing levels are having on nursing staff and patients. They also spoke about the importance of recruiting and retaining NHS nursing staff, providing appropriate training for existing staff, removing financial
HealthInvestor UK • April 2020
barriers for nursing students, and establishing accountability for nurse staffing levels. The importance of international recruitment was also discussed with politicians echoing the RCN’s demands for nurses to be exempt from the immigration health surcharge, for nursing to be listed as a shortage profession, and for a review of the salary cap for overseas nursing staff. The debate comes less than a month after RCN members descended on Downing Street to hand in petitions with more than 220,000 signatures calling on the government to end the workforce crisis in England. In the days leading up to the debate, hundreds of members tweeted their MPs urging them to attend. The RCN said it will be meeting with the minister for care, Helen Whately, in the coming weeks to discuss its campaign further.
Mohammad Yasin
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members.parliament.uk (CC BY 3.0)
Royal College of Nursing calls for safe nursing levels
