The smell of stewing apples wafts through the air of a social housing estate in Tingbjerg, a deprived urban suburb of Copenhagen. Jonn Winther, a jolly Danish chef with a Viking beard, is cooking a giant apple trifle on top of a bonfire in the community garden.
He works for a local government initiative, funded by the charitable arm of the Ozempic manufacturer Novo Nordisk, which has helped to drastically slash diabetes rates, by providing group cooking classes and meals for local families. “It’s all about giving children experience with vegetables they haven’t tasted before,” Winther said. “It helps to make a healthy culture that stays.”
This focus on preventing ill health in local communities, while at the same time embracing technology in hospital care, has made Denmark’s health system the envy of the Labour government.
Like the UK, Denmark provides state-funded healthcare which is free at the point of use. But unlike the UK, long waits are almost unheard of and there are high survival rates for cancer and heart disease.
Wes Streeting, the health secretary, has decided to seek inspiration from Denmark as he draws up the ten-year plan for the NHS, due to be published in May. The plan will be underpinned by “three big shifts” — from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention. Denmark is ahead of the curve on all three.
“Denmark’s healthcare system is a beacon of excellence,” Streeting told The Times. “They have blended a strong life sciences sector with cutting-edge technology and artificial intelligence to provide high-quality care for all.
“Their commitment to care in the community and preventative measures offers valuable insights as we reform the NHS. As we shift our healthcare system from hospital to community, analogue to digital, and sickness to prevention through our Ten-Year Health Plan, there’s much we can learn from Denmark’s success to make our NHS the envy of the world once more.”
This week The Times joined Karin Smyth, a health minister, as she was sent on a mission to Copenhagen to discover what the NHS can learn from its Danish counterparts.
Karin Smyth says the UK government is hoping to emulate many parts of Denmark’s healthcare system
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JAMES GLOSSOP
Brain surgery from 2,000 miles away
Denmark is sparsely populated and made up of 500 islands, meaning technology is used to “bridge the gap” between specialised medicine and remote communities.
Last October surgeons at Rigshospitalet in Copenhagen, the country’s largest hospital, helped conduct emergency brain surgery on a patient 2,200 miles away in Greenland. While cutting into the patient’s head, the doctor in Greenland wore smart glasses to beam live video back to Dr Jeppe Lohfert Haslund-Vinding, a surgeon in Copenhagen, who guided her in fixing a brain haemorrhage.
Technology is used across Denmark to cut down on “pointless appointments” and reduce long trips to hospital. Radiographers in Copenhagen, for example, will analyse MRI scans being conducted hundreds of miles away in the Faroe Islands.
Hospitals are paperless, with every citizen having an electronic health card, also available as an app, which stores all of their health records and can be scanned at clinics or hospitals.
Smyth, who was appointed minister of state for secondary care in July said that the UK government was hoping to emulate this system. Reforms will ensure that the NHS app can be used in hospital settings and patients can “book appointments in the same way you would book a restaurant table”. Smyth believes a “huge cultural change” is required so that patients spend as little time in hospital as possible, freeing up NHS resources.
“You have to empower patients where they are,” Smyth said. Often, travelling to hospital is a “real inconvenience and unnecessary”. Most doctors in Denmark work in the community, based in multi-speciality “health houses” tailored to the needs of neighbourhoods. In the UK, 38 per cent of doctors are based in hospitals, but in Denmark just 23 per cent are.
Chemotherapy in your living room
The focus on moving care out of hospitals means some Danish parents are trained to deliver powerful doses of chemotherapy to their own children. “We want to treat patients as close to their home as possible,” explained Rasmus Mogelvang, the chief executive of Rigshospitalet. “All our patients, including children, have the option to have chemotherapy at home. About half of children with cancer have chemo at home.”
The Rigshospitalet — Denmark’s largest hospital
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JAMES GLOSSOP
Back in the 1990s cancer survival rates in Denmark lagged behind many of its neighbours. They have turned this round after making cancer a political priority in 2000.
At present 99 per cent of cancer patients in Denmark begin treatment within four weeks of their initial referral. In England, meanwhile, only 62 per cent start treatment within two months.
For Smyth, 60, long NHS cancer waiting times are personal. She had melanoma skin cancer diagnosed in October 2023, and needed two operations on her leg. Smyth had to wait six weeks to get a diagnosis and a further eight weeks to start treatment.
“Waiting for a cancer diagnosis is the most stressful thing,” she said, speaking at the British embassy in Copenhagen. “Waiting for your results, being in that limbo, and critically, waiting to get on with your life. It causes a great deal of stress for you and everyone around you.”
The Danish government invests in technology to revolutionise waiting times and improve survival via a national innovation platform called Beta.Health, which provides grants to health start-ups.
During a tour of Rigshospitalet, Tobias Todsen, a surgeon, demonstrated a new device called 3Sonic, which uses artificial intelligence to perform live ultrasound scans during cancer surgery. It allows doctors to find out within minutes whether they have removed all of the tumour, replacing a manual process of analysing tissue samples in the laboratory, which can take weeks.
Capitalising on the Ozempic gold rush
On Wednesday morning, Smyth led a British delegation to tour the headquarters of Novo Nordisk, the Danish pharmaceutical giant that makes Ozempic and Wegovy. It is located in Bagsvaerd, a suburb 7.5 miles northwest of Copenhagen, which is the modern equivalent of a gold rush town. The success of weight-loss drugs has had ripple effects across the entire Danish health system and economy, with Novo Nordisk now the highest valued company in Europe, worth about $400 billion, and accounting for nearly half of GDP growth.
Talks focused on how Novo regards the UK as “part of its future” — the firm is opening an AI research hub in King’s Cross — as well as frustrations about the slow introduction of Wegovy on the NHS. “What really came across was how much they are wanting to work with us as a country, their support for our academic institutions and the NHS,” Smyth said.
The success of Novo Nordisk shows that health should be “front and centre of economic growth” in the UK, she added. “One of the lessons for us is, how does a government create the right conditions for life sciences and pharmaceutical companies like Novo to invest and develop? Denmark is a much smaller country, but they do a lot of public-private partnerships. They invest a lot in that life science sector.”
Smyth led a British delegation to the headquarters of Novo Nordisk
TIMES PHOTOGRAPHER JAMES GLOSSOP
While, in the form of Ozempic, Denmark may have found a miracle cure for type 2 diabetes and obesity, there is also a strong focus on preventing chronic diseases in the first place. We visited Tingbjerg Changing Diabetes, a community initiative founded in 2015. Diabetes rates in the suburb, which has 7,000 residents, used to be twice the national average. But by adopting an “entire neighbourhood” approach to healthy living, diabetes rates have been brought in line with the rest of Denmark. Doctors and nurses co-ordinate with residents, who maintain a community farm and garden to provide fresh meat, vegetables and eggs, while there are also exercise programmes including Zumba classes.