Winner
NHS Partnership Excellence: Collaborative Working at Its Best
Executive Summary
Sanofi believes strongly in the collaborative working with NHS organisations as a strategic approach to co-creating solutions for patient impact. Through our partnerships we aim to support customers with transforming services to increase access to therapies, improve services, improve outcomes for patients and to increase trust and reputation with NHS customers.Sanofi’s NHS Engagement and Access Team (NEAM Team) have pioneered a distinctive collaborative working approach that transcends traditional pharmaceutical-NHS relationships, creating transparent, mutually beneficial partnerships focused on shared objectives and patient outcomes.With an impressive portfolio of 78 projects spanning Integrated Care Boards, hospital trusts, and other NHS organisations, our award-winning NEAM Team has built a collaborative working framework based on transparency, shared commitment, and pooled expertise. These partnerships leverage Sanofi’s project management, service transformation experience and analytical tools alongside the NHS’s clinical knowledge and local insights to address healthcare challenges and improve patient pathways.Our collaborative working model has delivered measurable improvements in healthcare efficiency, patient access, and clinical outcomes across multiple therapy areas throughout the UK. Our team’s exceptional approach to partnership development has created sustainable value for patients and the NHS making us worthy recipients of the Partnership Team of the Year award.
Highly commended
EpilepsyMeds: A Three-Way Partnership Between Desitin Pharma, ChangeMed and Genetic Digital to Transform Clinical Decision-Making in Epilepsy Care
Executive Summary
Epilepsy treatment is complex, with clinicians often needing to compare multiple anti-seizure medicines, formulations and excipients to make safe, personalised decisions — particularly for children, elderly patients and those with dysphagia. Yet no single, trusted, licensed digital resource existed to support day-to-day prescribing. To solve this, Desitin Pharma, ChangeMed, and Genetic Digital formed a three-way partnership combining pharmaceutical insight, clinical educational expertise, and digital health capability. The result is EpilepsyMeds — a mobile-first, ABPI-compliant app and web platform giving HCPs rapid access to licensed anti-seizure medicine information, advanced filtering tools and direct SmPC links.The project was co-designed with epilepsy specialists, pharmacists, nurses and patient organisations. The partnership enabled the transformation of complex pharmaceutical and clinical data into an intuitive tool with powerful real-world utility: HCPs can filter ~570 products by excipients, formulation, carbohydrate content, safety considerations and patient-specific needs.In its first year, EpilepsyMeds achieved 1,000+ active users, 34,000+ interactions, and strong clinical endorsement from national epilepsy leaders. It has enhanced prescribing confidence, reduced decision-making time, and strengthened Desitin’s reputation as a trusted partner in epilepsy care.The project demonstrates genuine partnership excellence — built on shared purpose, integrated expertise and measurable patient and system benefit.
Highly commended
Salford Royal Hospital & Merck Serono: Salford Early Diagnostics MS Clinic Collaborative Working Project
Executive Summary
The Salford Early Diagnostics Clinic Collaborative Working Project is a partnership between Merck Serono and Salford Royal Hospital, led by Dr Joyutpal Das and Christian Magson. It addresses a critical challenge in MS care: timely diagnosis and treatment to preserve long‑term brain health. As highlighted in the MS Brain Health report (Giovannoni et al., 2015) and peer‑reviewed literature (Cerqueira et al., 2018), “time matters in MS” — early intervention reduces relapses, slows disability progression, and improves outcomes.Previously, patients faced an average wait of 18 months before accessing specialist services. To tackle this, Merck provided funding for a new clinic aimed to diagnose patients earlier, supported by referral and diagnostic pathways. Pathway mapping streamlined processes, reducing referral times to 6 months; enabling earlier diagnosis, faster treatment initiation and improved outcomes.Salford Royal, one of the UK’s largest MS centres caring for over 5,000 patients, introduced pathways that increase capacity and triage patients efficiently based on MRI evidence of demyelination. The clinic reviews 6 patients per week, with a 95% diagnosis rate, and is projected to assess 200 new patients by year‑end.This project exemplifies transformative collaboration between industry and NHS, embedding sustainable models of care with clear potential for replication nationally.
Sponsored by
