BRADFORD District and Craven has been selected by the Health Foundation to be part of its new programme supporting healthcare providers to establish an innovation hub to adopt and adapt best practice and improve people’s health.
The independent charity’s Adopting Innovation programme is supporting four innovation hubs with funding of up to £475,000 each for two-and-a-half years. The programme creates the conditions that will enable faster and more effective uptake of innovation and improvement.
The project will be delivered under the banner of Act as One, the health and care partnership for Bradford District and Craven. Through this Adopting Innovation project, an Innovation Hub will be developed, focusing on ‘ageing well’, one of the priority areas for the local system.
Anticipatory care
Funding from the Health Foundation will help the local Innovation Hub to offer coaching and leadership programmes, peer networks, trained innovation champions, campaigns to raise awareness of the support available, and community engagement and co-production. The focus of the work will be on anticipatory care (helping people make positive choices about future care needs should a health problem flare up), enhanced health in care homes and urgent community response.
Mel Pickup, Chief Executive for Bradford Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust said: “We are absolutely delighted to have been selected to be one of four innovation hubs across the country. Covid has demonstrated we can rapidly adopt new approaches across our partnership. We want to inject the same urgency introduced by Covid to accelerate adoption of the best evidence-based approaches for other major health challenges in our area, and create the conditions and support for successful implementation.
“Our project will involve all NHS organisations across our place, the local authority working alongside the Voluntary and Community Sector Assembly; Healthwatch Bradford; Bradford Institute of Health Research; Yorkshire and Humber Academic Health Science Network; Yorkshire and Humber Improvement Academy; and the University of Bradford. We will create a dedicated post to bring innovation to life and tackle the health inequalities that affect our communities.
Improve outcomes
“The Yorkshire and Humber Improvement Academy will act as coaches and mentors to those leading local adoption and adaption of innovation so that we have a strong evidence-based approach so we can embed changes that help improve outcomes for people across our place.”
Will Warburton, Director of Improvement at the Health Foundation, said: “This is a unique opportunity for the four innovation hubs to create change to improve patient care. It comes at a time where the NHS needs to accelerate effective uptake of new ideas to meet the challenges of delivering care to all who need it during the pandemic.”
The hubs will act as centres of expertise and support within provider organisations to help them, and their local health systems, become better adopters of innovation. In doing this, healthcare organisations can create long-lasting impact for patients and patient care. More information on the Health Foundation can be found by visiting www.health.org.uk.
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