North East and North Cumbria Medicines Value Programme Est. 2025 (2025)

North East and North Cumbria Integrated Care Board 

Project summary

In March 2025, NENC Medicines Value Programme was established with a mission to identify and drive the implementation of medicines value initiatives across the region. The programme bridges actual and perceived gaps between individual acute providers, and the commissioner, creating open and constructive dialogue to tackle opportunities, barriers and challenges together.
Core to the successful and sustainable delivery has been establishing collaboration over competition. Thus, a diverse range of stakeholders have been brought together on a voluntary basis to form the NENC Medicines Value Group with pharmacy, medical and finance representation.

The NHS spends >£19b pa on medicines (around 50% in secondary care). In 24/25, NENC Integrated Care System spent over £668m on medicines in secondary care, a figure that has risen by on average 10% each year.

Programme tools have been developed to create insights from big data and horizon scanning has identified opportunities as well as quantifying the scale of past missed opportunities. For the first time the region has a joined-up medicines cost improvement plan allowing innovation, creativity and resources to be shared across the 8 trusts with support from the commissioner and avoidance of duplication of work. Through sharing best practice and lessons learnt we are more prepared to maximise on biosimilar and generic switches. Systems thinking has encouraged the group to consider initiatives that have perceived limited benefits to the individual provider but are the 'right thing to do' because of the potential impact on the system. E.g. work undertaken by secondary care has supported the potential realisation of over £3.4m of savings on omeprazole liquid in primary care.

Opportunities exceeding £15m in 25/26 have been identified by the programme; >£10m of efficiencies being tracked monthly with YE forecasting.

The programme provides opportunity as a collaborative to tackle unwarranted variations in prescribing. Through benchmarking and addressing outliers we can assure that best value is achieved from taxpayer money in terms of quality, efficiency and efficacy of treatments available. We can ensure that the finite resources available are used fairly and tailored according to the needs of our population. Maximising on our opportunities we can reduce diversion of funds from other aspects of patient care to cover the ever-increasing drug bill and in turn improve access to treatments.