Healthcare sector ripe for China-UK cooperation

Kevin Holland, minister-counselor and director of life sciences, healthcare and social care for China, based in the British embassy in Beijing, is sure that the next decade of improving patients' wellbeing will come from United Kingdom's innovation combined with Chinese collaboration.

Every country in the world is facing the same major challenges in healthcare, and one challenge is that as people live longer and longer, the task of fighting diseases and managing health systems change very much, he said.

To tackle these challenges, UK's publicly funded healthcare system, the National Health Service, which is one of the world's oldest and largest integrated healthcare systems that offers everyone universal access to healthcare using the most innovative technologies and with positive health outcomes for a low cost, has accumulated much experiences that can be discussed with China, he said.

There are a number of cooperation projects that have already happened between China and UK, including government-to-government cooperation on policies, hospitals working together in diabetes or cardiovascular disease, universities collaborating to drive innovation and new technologies, and business to business cooperation, according to him.

Holland also said that as China accelerates its digitalization front, and the NHS with extensive experience applying digital health across system, digitalization of healthcare systems may also be another point of discussion and experience sharing between the two countries.

Joy Lin, vice-president for market access in China with Smith & Nephew, and Li Zhijiang, CEO of AK Medical, a Beijing-based medical device company, said they were confident in future collaboration between China and the UK.