Building on the success of the original London Health Bridge project, which delivered **1,000 samples per month** and established the world's most prominent medical drone delivery service, the London Health Bridge: Growth project will scale operations to **50,000 samples per month**. It will also add new sites to create the first truly multi-site NHS drone logistics network. Using new technology that allows one pilot to safely oversee multiple drones at once, this project will enable rapid, two-way flights between Guy's Hospital, St Thomas' Hospital, Synlab's Blackfriars hub, and King's College Hospital. Each flight will take just 2-5 minutes, significantly faster than congested road journeys, and with no direct carbon emissions. The service will be capable of responding in real time to urgent clinical needs. NHS demand for pathology testing continues to rise. Synlab, one of the UK's largest NHS pathology providers, processes **25 million tests annually**, around 96,000 every day. Around 95% of clinical pathways rely on timely lab results, such as testing cerebrospinal fluid from emergency departments to rule out serious infections or cancer, or transporting paediatric bone marrow samples to confirm suspected leukaemia. But today, these samples depend on road-based couriers that are increasingly expensive, unreliable, and polluting. This project offers a smarter alternative. By shifting urgent deliveries from road to air, drone flights will **reduce logistics costs and emissions** while enabling clinicians to work more efficiently, **boosting NHS productivity** and patient outcomes. The new service will be fully integrated into hospital systems to support automated dispatching and scheduling, ensuring safe and seamless operations alongside existing NHS workflows. Led by UK healthcare logistics startup Apian, in partnership with drone operator Matternet, Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Foundation Trust, Synlab, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA), and Airspace Navigation Service Provider, NATS, the project will operate within dedicated, CAA-authorised airspace across central London. The project will generate the clinical, technical, and regulatory evidence needed to expand across London and the rest of the UK, helping to build a faster, greener, and more resilient NHS logistics network, and create an NHS fit for the future. It directly supports the Government's ambitions for NHS reform, Net Zero, and the safe, scalable and publicly-acceptable use of drones set out in the Department for Transport's Future of Flight Action Plan and the CAA's Airspace Modernisation Strategy.

OSPREH stands for **O**ptimising **S**peed, **P**roductivity, **R**esilience and **E**fficiency in **H**ealthcare The NHS is a non homogenous organisation that must interface with external pharmaceutical, supplies and testing laboratories. The sharing of resources between hospitals and optimised, rapid, reliable and prioritised interfacing with external suppliers and service providers could increase the resilience of the system when faced with the sudden impact of a dramatic event. Typical cases include the sharing of PPE stocks, the laboratory testing of blood pathology and the urgent supply of cancer treatments to hospitals unable to make the cytotoxic drugs locally. In each of these cases we can show that the NHS is not resilient, lacking speed of service, reliability and efficient productivity. OSPREH's vision is to apply state of the art aerial drones in combination with robotics and AI methods to speed up the interconnect between different hospitals and external bodies. Key to this vision is the development and evaluation of ergonomic SMART drone pad control centres, highly automated to deal with drone transport; specifically addressing in bound outbound flight safety and security, drone maintenance, drone garaging, as well as origin and endpoint parcel/item handling. In addition to this, OSPREH will perform SMART tracking of items (assigning priority and deadlines), the AI providing recommendations coordinating both drone logistics and hospital work flow.

COVID-19 has highlighted the challenges and requirements for increased resilience in NHS supply chain logistics. There has never been a better time to create a faster, more dependable and environmentally friendly method of transporting medical supplies. A medical drone delivery service can break chains of COVID-19 transmission by taking humans out-of-the-loop, protecting key NHS staff and the wider public. It also frees-up key staff allowing them to focus on patient care and levelling up service provision.. Apian, a healthcare drone startup, founded by doctors in training, NHS Clinical Entrepreneurs and Innovation Fellows at Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust (MSE), is collaborating with the hospital group and Pathology First (pathology laboratory) to deliver COVID-19 blood and swab tests between its hospitals and labs in response to the pandemic. In addition, Apian has also been requested by the Portsmouth Hospitals University NHS Trust and Isle of Wight NHS Trust to transport high-value chemotherapy drugs across the solent, due to the significant logistical disruption to ferries and hovercrafts by COVID-19. Apian is uniquely positioned. Not only can they help solve the technical challenges of BVLOS, but they can also lay the foundation for legal frameworks, standards and best practice and guidelines from within the NHS, all while generating a strong public pull for drones in healthcare - key to unlocking drone delivery across the UK. Their understanding of the healthcare system, access to it and ability to transfer medical needs into technical requirements is what makes Project Léman unique. Apian is the NHS drone API, that integrates the NHS, drone industry and regulators. The platform will schedule and track deliveries, contract NHS certified drone operators, match delivery requests to available lab capacity, manage risk and ensure regulatory compliance. Project Léman will see Apian tender multiple drone providers and select the most appropriate operators for each use-case based on the needs of the patient and clinician. There will be a four week flying demonstration at MSE and the solent delivering patient samples and chemotherapy to enable quicker diagnosis through reduced travel times and a more environmentally sustainable manner. At the end of the project, Apian plans to scale and share its learnings, including the impact on health outcomes, through a published white paper for wider industry and public benefit.