Innovation is central to addressing the challenges facing our health and care system. Innovation is a broad term, and to us, means new ways of doing things which could be a new technology or treatment, a new service or an existing service in a new setting. The ICB has a statutory duty to promote innovation in the provision of health and care services.

We know that innovation tends to improve healthcare and potentially leads to services being more cost-effective. We believe it is useful to champion new ways of working, where needed, to ensure our services are more reflective of changing needs.

Innovation is a cross-cutting theme within the ICB and across the ICS, and we aspire for it to be integral to everything we do. We wish to ensure that the opportunities for receiving innovative services are equitable across the ICS and we aim to support the adoption, evaluation and spread of innovations.

You can contact us at nwicb.researchinnovation@nhs.net

What we do

We are focussed on embedding a culture of innovation across the ICB and wider ICS. We support the system to have an integrated innovation culture based on learning from, and sharing with, each other across the system.

We support ICB/ICS teams to identify innovation needs and work with partners such as Health Innovation East and the NHS InSites programme to scope and match innovations that are of value and support the needs of our local population.

We work with teams to support them to implement, evaluate, adopt and spread innovations that meet the needs of our local population.

Innovation culture and learning 

Developing and nurturing an integrated innovation culture across a system is an evolving process but we aim to position the importance of innovation as a central, shared concern. We use a multi-level approach across the system to grow innovation capacity, this includes a system-wide vision for innovation, sharing of innovation across teams and providers, upskilling staff across all levels, and working with external organisations to help us grow an innovation culture.  

We host and facilitate an innovation network and provide learning opportunities across the ICS to support collaboration and sharing of innovation needs, solutions and projects across teams. The aim of this network is to accelerate the use of innovation across the ICS through partnership working.

Innovation implementation and evaluation

Identifying innovation needs, matching them to suitable innovations that are safe and impactful to our local population and then implementing these, can be a complex process. We work with ICB/ICS teams to help them identify innovation needs and then work with partners and innovators to match innovations to the identified needs. We will support due diligence processes to ensure that innovations are implemented as effectively and safely as possible. Implementation science principles and strategies are used to support the adoption, evaluation, spread and sustainment of innovations into practice where these are deemed safe, impactful and provide value to our local population and the system.

Dr Tim Clarke – Head of Innovation

Gigi Moller – Innovation Project Manager, Advisor (Health Innovation East)