The UK has another new Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, who has wasted no time in laying out his plans to fundamentally reform the country’s creaking healthcare infrastructure.
In order to reduce the near-critical pressure on the NHS, Burnham is taking aim at reform at the failing adult-social care sector, telling the BBC this week that ‘if the government did not reform social care, the NHS would collapse under the weight of trying to care for people who’ve really not needed to end up in the NHS system’.
Hospitals are absorbing patients whose needs should be being addressed in the community. The system is fragmented, underfunded, means-tested and under strain. Within that debate, medical cannabis is rarely mentioned, but it probably should be.
The primary conditions medical cannabis prescribed for, such as chronic pain, treatment-resistant anxiety, PTSD, and neurological conditions, map closely onto the cohort the social care system was designed to support.
Graham Woodward, a registered mental health nurse with 28 years experience across statutory, voluntary and private healthcare, now Chief Operating Officer at Releaf Clinic, believes that the medical cannabis sector could play a critical role in alleviating some of that pressure.
“I am surprised every day by how many people still do not understand that prescribing is legal,” he told Business of Cannabis. “There is still a lot of naivety.”
With Woodward suggesting there are already 100,000 active patients in the UK, he believes there is a ‘potential two or three million patients’ in the UK who could benefit from medical cannabis in future.
Building an organisation to serve that market, and to withstand the regulatory and reputational scrutiny that comes with it, has been the work of the past 18 months.
Who Releaf hires, and who doesn’t stay
The clinic now employs 50 to 55 doctors and nurses, none of whom arrived with prior experience in prescribing cannabis.
This, Woodward explains, is a deliberate hiring decision. In his view, early operators who built their practices around high-THC products and flexible formularies represent a liability for the industry, not an asset.
The absence of what he calls ‘connoisseur’ prescribers, those who arrived from elsewhere in the sector with established views on high-THC products and flexible prescribing, is deliberate.
“When doctors have joined us and wanted to be more connoisseur about it, they have not stayed, because we are not going to be flexible just to bring in patients. We do very well for patient acquisition without doing that.”
The senior clinical team reflects this ethos. Releaf’s medical director, two clinical directors – one a GP, the other an A&E consultant – and its lead oncologist have all left full-time NHS roles to work with the clinic.
Woodward’s own background is in psychiatric nursing and addiction medicine, including six years at Indivior, which specialises in opioid dependency treatment, a clinical territory which overlaps with the psychiatric complexity of cannabis patients.
Maintaining standards at scale
The governance architecture that makes this hiring philosophy viable runs to 15 triage staff, four to six multidisciplinary team reviews daily, and 40 people in patient support managing calls, emails, adverse reaction reports and general queries.
Direct access to NHS Spine for patient records and designated body status for medical revalidation, meaning Releaf’s doctors do not require NHS employment to maintain their registration, give the clinic structural integration with the NHS system that most private operators lack.
None of this has yet been formally assessed by the Care Quality Commission.
“It is unheard of to have the volume of patients we have had and still not have been inspected by the CQC,” Woodward said. “We have had our CQC slide deck ready for two years. If they turned up tomorrow, we would be ready. Every person knows their role.
“You have clinics pointing the finger at us that cannot pass CQC inspections. Yet no one wants to look at our practice.”
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What patient support looks like in practice
The 40-strong patient support team is one measure of what managing a large and growing patient population actually requires. Another is visible in the data from Releaf’s legal helpline, Releaf Protect, which launched in January 2026 in partnership with law firm Irwin Mitchell.
In its first three and a half months, the service handled 114 call sessions totalling 27 hours of legal advice. Employment issues were the largest category at 29% of calls, with discrimination, unfair dismissal, and termination of employment dominating.
This was followed by criminal litigation at 23% and motor offences at 18%, the latter almost entirely driven by patients navigating driving under the influence of a prescribed medication. It’s data offers a crucial snapshot of what it means to be a medical cannabis patient in the UK in 2026.
The next phase
The team Woodward has built has, by his account, given him the space to ‘step away from being hands-on operationally’ and focus on broader external challenges facing the sector.
A key area for Woodward and the wider team at Releaf, is making the case for medical cannabis on the basis of clinical evidence rather than advocacy.
Releaf licenses 15 validated outcome measurement tools across its 101,200-patient database. Of approximately 1,500 patients who completed the GAD-7 anxiety assessment, around 1,200 showed significant improvements.
Around 7,000 EQ-5D quality-of-life assessments have been collected, with 75% showing improvements. The clinic works with Johns Hopkins University and holds licensed access to Mapi and Galen for instrument methodology.
“What I really want to do is get the real picture out there,” Woodward says. “I want to get the data out.”
As Burnham’s government accelerates the Casey Commission’s timetable, the question of which community-based interventions can genuinely relieve NHS pressure will require evidence to answer.
Woodward’s position is that Releaf already holds some of it, prospectively collected, peer-reviewed in methodology, and available to any policymaker or commissioner willing to look.
“We are here for the long term. The truth is, we do not need to pivot much, because we have never deviated from the guidance in the first place.”
