The Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) has launched its ambitious new business plan for 2024/25, setting out the agency’s core focus of enabling access to innovative healthcare products while ensuring delivery for all who need its services – patients and the public, healthcare professionals, researchers and developers.
As an Executive Agency of the Department of Health and Social Care, the MHRA has an important role in the delivery of the Government’s priorities to ensure people live healthier and longer lives, including its mission to build an NHS fit for the future, driving innovation in the life sciences, and accelerating regulatory approval.
The Agency’s core mission remains unchanged – to protect and promote public health by ensuring that healthcare products, used every day by millions of people in the UK, work and are acceptably safe. The MHRA puts patients at the heart of everything it does, and increasingly involves patients in its decision making.
Building on progress since the launch of its three-year corporate plan in 2023, the targets that the MHRA has been delivering against since 1 April 2024 involve making significant improvements to ensure high quality and sustainable regulatory and scientific services that operate to predictable timescales. The Business Plan also reflects recent developments in regulatory science, which inform the Agency’s plan to create a UK network of Centres of Excellence in Regulatory Science.
Dr June Raine, Chief Executive of the MHRA, said: “To take full advantage of today’s exciting developments in science and technology for the benefit of patients, we will focus on facilitating access to innovative new products while also ensuring continued access to well-established healthcare products that are the backbone of NHS healthcare. We will continue to invest in our talented staff by creating satisfying roles and careers, implement an exciting and robust talent management programme, promote diversity and inclusivity and continue to grow as an organisation where every individual can reach their full potential and deliver excellent performance.”
The MHRA has built its latest plan around four strategic priorities:
- Maintain public trust through transparency and proactive communication, including working to address health inequalities
- Enable healthcare access to safe and effective medical products
- Deliver scientific and regulatory excellence through strategic partnerships
- Become an agency where people flourish alongside a responsive customer service culture.
The MHRA’s 2024/25 Business Plan can be read in full here.