Innovation

As part of the Plan for Growth, the NHS Chief Executive asked Sir Ian Carruthers to lead a review on his behalf on how the spread of innovations can be accelerated across the NHS .  The report was published in December 2011 and is available on the link below.

Innovation Health and Wealth, Accelerating Adoption and Diffusion in the NHS

‘The Innovation Review – call for evidence and ideas’ outlines innovation and the NHS as:

"innovation is an idea, service or product new to the NHS, or applied in a way that is new to healthcare, which significantly improves the quality of health and care wherever it is applied."

That means the innovations have:

• to be in part, new, or applied in new ways (rather than simple improvements in performance)
• to be taken up i.e. implemented (rather than just being a good idea)
• to serve a purpose (significant improvements in quality and/or productivity).

This could be an innovative technology (such as mobile healthcare apps); devices (such as the Oesophageal Doppler) or care pathways (from unnecessary length of stays to supportive early discharge using telehealth).

Innovation takes many forms. It can be incremental (building on and improving existing practices), radical (a completely new approach to solving existing problems), or revolutionary/disruptive (an innovation that creates an entirely new and unexpected market e.g. the World Wide Web, mobile phones). Innovation is not limited to the scientific community or the laboratory. It also refers to changes in thinking, products, processes, or organisations.

Innovation is the successful implementation of new ideas, divided into three stages:

• invention (or identification) – finding new ways of doing things
• adoption (including prototyping and evaluation) – testing new ways of doing things and putting into practice
• diffusion (or spread) – systematic uptake or copying across the service.

We also need to identify and find ways to reduce the barriers to innovation.

When it comes to invention, the NHS is recognised as a world leader, but more needs to be done to  accelerate the use of those inventions, developing more integrated, effective and more cost-effective ways of delivering care. The NHS remains a major investor and wealth creator in the UK, and in science and engineering in particular.