Update to NHS IP Guidance
20 November 2025
The UK government has updated NHS IP guidance for the first time in 23 years to fuel innovation.
Updated Intellectual Property Guidance for the NHS in England has now been published following an announcement by Minister Ahmed at the Future of Health event, part of London Life Sciences Week. The IP guidance reflects the collective effort of many individuals and organisations across the health and life sciences ecosystem, including Medipex, and specifically addresses particular challenges that have hampered innovation in the sector since the first guidance was published in 2002.
Medipex is excited by this new development, and feel that the guidance is a huge asset for NHS service providers and commissioners, giving them a clear steer on expectations and good practice principles to help implement and embed related activities. The expected benefits include speeding up, and encouraging, innovative changes to practice; provision of more support for innovative staff, with clearer rewards for such activities; more rapid improvements to the way healthcare is delivered and of course at the heart of it all, patient benefits.
Medipex has been supporting multiple NHS servicer providers and commissioners for more than 20 years to identify, protect, develop and disseminate their innovative ideas (referred to as Technology Transfer Capabilities (TTCs)). This updated guidance will support us and our membership clients to streamline these processes resulting in greater successes.
Lindsay Georgopoulos, Medipex CEO said “Medipex was born out of the first guidance that was issued in 2002, and since then we have supported the assessment and development of over 2,500 innovations and taken over 100 products to market through a combination of spin-out company formation, commercial licenses, co-developments and non-commercial dissemination. There have been many challenges along the way, including lack of clear decision making processes within NHS organisations and grey areas around IP ownership that have resulted in many more ideas not progressing as they should have done. This new guidance will improve the situation, empowering individuals and organisations to make good decisions and find the optimal route to realise the benefits from their staff’s brilliant ideas”.
Under ‘Actions for Organisations To Take’ the guidance states that organisations providing or commissioning NHS services should:
- assign a Senior Responsible Officer (SRO) for IP management and set up effective IP decision-making processes
- review and update their IP policies in line with the good practice principles
- explore and evaluate accessing TTCs
- make IP policies and TTC arrangements publicly available (for example, publish on their website)
- provide rolling training to staff on the importance of effective IP management
In due course, there will be an expectation for organisations to provide an annual return to DHSC and NHS England summarising how they have complied with the actions on good practice and explain any variation from this guidance with appropriate mitigations. We would therefore encourage any NHS service providers or commissioners to get in touch with us to find out about our flexible and dynamic services that can help organisations to comply with the guidance, and meet this requirement.
- Please view the press release here for details of the announcement: Government fuels NHS innovation to unlock billions in growth - GOV.UK
- Please view the publication here: Intellectual property (IP) guidance for the NHS in England - GOV.UK
- Please view a quick explainer video here: We asked Dr Zubir Ahmed MP – why is new intellectual property guidance for the NHS such a game changer?
For more information, please visit the IP guidance for the NHS webinars page.