‘NHS Innovation Week’ is due to take place in the week of 27th April – 1st May.  The aim of the initiative is to celebrate existing innovation in health and healthcare and to announce some new measures to promote the development of an innovative NHS. 

Innovation is being defined by the Department of Health as the successful implementation of new ideas, how they are invented, adopted and diffused.  The NHS is widely regarded as being world class at inventing new solutions to challenges, the focus now must be on promoting the adoption and diffusion of innovation.

The measures to be announced during ‘Innovation Week’ are indicative of the significant investment in the future of the NHS to embed innovation in service delivery locally.  Innovation is a key component of staying ahead and ensuring that NHS patients have access to high quality health and healthcare, particularly during these tough economic times.

Measures to be announced during NHS Innovation Week include:

• The new regional innovation funds  in which the DH will be investing £220m to identify, grow and diffuse innovation
• New innovation challenge prizes which are supported by £20m of DH funding to foster an enterprise and innovation culture within the NHS, directly benefiting patients and the public
• NHS Evidence, a new single web-based portal, will allow quick and easy access to authoritative and unbiased evidence to support clinical and non-clinical decision making. The service will be managed by NICE having received £15m in funding from DH. 

‘Innovation Week’ will communicate these messages in a series of announcements.  Please find attached a draft schedule of the announcements that we expect to take place during the week.

‘Innovation Week’ provides us with an excellent opportunity in NHS Yorkshire and the Humber to promote awareness to some of the innovation that is already taking place in our region.   At a regional level we plan to issue a press release on every day of ‘Innovation Week’ to promote the excellent examples of innovation that are taking place across the region.  We would strongly encourage all our organisations to do the same.

In addition to Innovation Week, the DH will be hosting a Healthcare Innovation Exposition at the ExCel Centre, London on 18th and 19th June.  The event will bring together leading thinkers and innovators from public, private, voluntary, academic and scientific health care communities from the UK and overseas to focus on promoting innovation in the NHS.  We will be writing out to you with more details of this event in the next week. 

For any further information please contact laura.hibbs@yorksandhumber.nhs.uk