Supported by the West of England AHSN, the health system in Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG) has been awarded funding from NHSX’s Digital Health Partnership Award to roll-out the myCOPD app alongside digital health champions to support patients with Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).
myCOPD provides guides on self-management, how and when to take medication, pulmonary rehabilitation and more, to help patients to recover and manage their condition effectively at home.
Roll-out of the app within the BNSSG system will start in December 2021, expanding to further areas throughout 2022.
We are currently recruiting a COPD Clinical Lead and Clinical Champions in primary, secondary and community care to support this project. Read more about these opportunities here.
A focus on COPD as part of the National Adoption and Spread Safety Improvement Programme (A&S-SIP)
The overarching objective of the A&S-SIP is to identify and support the spread and adoption of effective and safe evidence-based interventions and practice.
Each of the programme’s objectives intend to make medical procedures, and discharges from acute settings, as safe as possible whilst driving forward healthcare innovation.
In relation to COPD, our local delivery has focused on supporting an increase in the proportion of patients in acute hospitals receiving every element (for which they are eligible) of the British Thoracic Society COPD discharge care bundle.
The national A&S-SIP is led by NHS England and Improvement. The programme is delivered locally by the West of England Patient Safety Collaborative. Read more about A&S-SIP.
The West of England Academy is launching a free online course focused on innovation in healthcare from 1 November.
The free, four-session course has been developed by the West of England AHSN and the University of Bath’s Centre for Healthcare Innovation and Improvement (CHI²).
The lead educators will be available during November to answer questions and respond to comments, and whilst the facilitated course ends on Friday 26 November, the content will be continually available to learners via the Future Learn platform.
Attendees will join hundreds of healthcare staff and innovators from around the world who will benefit from this training whilst learning at their own pace from wherever they choose.
The course is primarily aimed at health practitioners, clinicians, health and care managers and commissioners. However, it will also be of interest to those who want to understand more about the challenges of innovation in healthcare including undergraduate and postgraduate students, and innovators from the commercial sector.
CPD certification is available on the Future Learn platform with a paid upgrade.
Undecided? Want to know more? Join our introductory webinar:
To introduce the online learning and answer any questions you may have, we are hosting a 30-minute webinar on Tuesday 12 October at 12noon. Please register your attendance here.
The West of England Academy are hosting a new series of five interactive online workshops each Wednesday morning from 28 April focusing on the successful adoption and spread of healthcare innovation, best practice or products.
Free to attend, and for any healthcare project team member or innovator based in the West of England, each two-hour session is standalone so you can choose individual workshops or sign up for the series.
Ideally attendees will be working on a live project and come with an improvement idea they have tested at small scale in an NHS organisation and who want to learn how to think about the skills and capabilities needed for adoption and spread.
Attendees can be in any role and level within their organisation, for example from clinical, administration or facilities.
Our academy works hard to welcome attendees from a broad range of backgrounds creating a safe and open environment for learning and sharing ideas.
The innovation delivery arm of the NHS, the AHSN Network, has released its Impact Report 2018-2020. The report highlights outstanding impacts achieved by AHSNs, including the West of England, and evidences how they are driving adoption and spread in healthcare innovation, transforming patient outcomes, enabling efficiencies, saving the NHS money, generating economic growth and attracting millions of pounds of investment for the country’s economy.
The report also details how AHSNs have mobilised quickly to COVID-19 to support the NHS and health and social care response.
Key national programme findings from the report show that 13,387 fewer patients are at risk from harm from medication errors as a result of PINCER. The Network’s atrial fibrillation work has helped prevent 11,734 strokes and saved 2,933 lives. Whilst 8,472 people with chronic joint pain have participated in ESCAPE-pain courses.
From 2019-2020, the AHSN Network has generated almost £322.3 million inward investment for our nation, and created and / or protected over 1,000 jobs during this time.
The AHSN Network helps mobilise the value that the NHS can add as an economic asset to the UK economy. AHSNs broker access to a range of expert support and services across the health and care sectors that support NHS innovators and companies to realise the commercial and economic potential of their ideas.
England’s 15 Patient Safety Collaboratives (PSCs) have significantly contributed to the NHS Patient Safety Strategy through their work on managing deterioration, maternity and neonatal safety, and adoption and spread programmes.
PSCs play an essential role in identifying and spreading safety improvement programmes (SIPs) to create sustainable and continuous improvement in settings such as maternity units, emergency departments, mental health trusts, GP practices and care homes.
Successes include spreading the National Early Warning Score (NEWS2) to 99% of all acute hospital trusts, a 92% uptake of a discharge care bundle for patients with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), and more than 120,000 views of a series of training films developed for care home staff.
To support the COVID-19 response AHSNs pivoted their expertise and resources, highlighting their unique ability to be able to work with regional health systems to spread innovation, whilst collaborating across England to drive rapid transformative change across large geographies.
Key examples of AHSNs responding to the pandemic include; providing expertise to NHS regions, by embedding staff in regional COVID-19 response cells, which was equivalent to 157 full time staff. And working with NHSX and NHS Digital, AHSNs help to drive digitisation of primary care, achieving a near-total uptake of video and online consultations in two months across GP practices in England. We also published a rapid-learning report on our patient safety work, ‘Safer care during COVID-19’.
By autumn 2020, AHSNs were continuing to support the COVID-19 response whilst providing expert input to regional NHS planning around the restoration and recovery of services. Nationally, AHSNs have also been leading the NHS ‘Reset’ campaign with NHS Confederation and the Health Foundation and have been playing a key supporting role in the NHS Beneficial Changes Network, focusing on ‘locking in’ learning from the pandemic.
Find out more about how we are working with health and social care colleagues across our region to keep people safe during and after COVID-19.
Piers Ricketts, Chair of the AHSN Network and Chief Executive of Eastern AHSN said:
“We are achieving results that make a real difference for patients and service users, as well as healthcare professionals, innovators and NHS organisations. These strong foundations make us ideally placed to help all those involved in improving and innovating health and care to tackle together the challenges that lie ahead.
The AHSNs’ response to COVID-19 has highlighted how our core strengths and ways of working have proved a valued asset to our partners. AHSNs are agile and well connected organisations, and we were able to mobilise and respond to this new crisis almost overnight, providing additional support and brokering relationships across health and care, research and academia, industry and the voluntary sectors.”
New national programmes
From April 2020, AHSNs are working on three new national programmes;
Focus ADHD; a number of AHSNs are working with mental health trusts and community paediatric services to improve the assessment process for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) using computer-based tests (measuring attention, impulsivity and activity).
Early Intervention Eating Disorders; a number of AHSNs are supporting mental health teams across England to speed up diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders in young people aged 16 to 25.
Lipid management and FH; AHSNs are scoping a national programme of work around cardiovascular disease (CVD) prevention, which is anticipated to start in autumn 2020.
The West of England Academy are hosting a series of five online workshops each Wednesday from 27 January on quality improvement (QI). Free to attend, and for any innovator or employee within healthcare, each one-hour session is standalone so you can choose individual workshops or sign up for the series.
Each workshop will be interactive, so you can apply learning in real-world scenarios. The workshops will be beneficial regardless if you are working on a specific QI project or not. If you encounter challenges in your role (or outside work), and want to consider how these can be tackled through QI, these sessions will help.
Attendees can be in any role or level within their organisation or business; for example clinical, product development, administration or facilities.
Our academy works hard to welcome attendees from a broad range of backgrounds creating a safe and open environment for learning and sharing ideas.
The West of England Academy offers a wide range of free resources to healthcare professionals and innovators across the region. To find out more, visit our Academy pages or email weahsn.academy@nhs.net.
It is estimated that across the UK, a third of healthcare improvement projects never spread beyond their particular unit, a further third are embedded across their organisation but never spread further than that, and only the final third are spread across their own and other similar organisations. Through the West of England Academy supported by our new guide, we aim to support our member organisations and innovators increase the adoption and spread of successful innovations and improvements in the health and social care sector.
Successfully spreading improvements and ensuring changes are sustained requires overcoming numerous challenges, such as:
Creating an awareness of why the change is needed
Ensuring those involved have a desire to support and participate in the change
Knowledge of how to bring about change
The skills and resources to bring about the change
Ensuring processes to sustain the change
Our new guide (which you can download here) sets out suggestions to be considered for the successful adoption and spread of innovation and improvement projects. Our Academy will also be hosting a free series of workshops focusing on adoption and spread in spring 2021.
The West of England Academy provides a range of free resources to help you gain knowledge and develop essential skills for innovative thinking and working. We promote the use of quality improvement methodologies to support delivery of better patient care. We also offer a range of resources focused on evidence and evaluation.
If you would like further guidance on this subject, please contact us through Innovation@weahsn.net.
Our Academy also hosts free workshops and learning events. Whether you are looking to learn more about: inventing, innovating, improving or realising impact, and whatever your background or healthcare experience, we hope we’ll have something suitable for you. If you have any suggestions for potential events, or know of any training that we can share then please contact Academy@weahsn.net and let us know.
The NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) – an NHS England initiative supported by England’s 15 Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs) and hosted at UCLPartners – has launched its call for applications representing high impact, evidence-based innovations. Successful applicants will become 2021 NIA Fellows.
The call is open to local, national and international healthcare innovations supported by passionate individuals from any background, including SMEs, clinicians, charity/third sector and academics.
In alignment with the current NHS priorities of COVID-19 Reset and Recovery, innovations put forward this year must address at least one of the following themes:
NHS response to COVID-19
Mental health
Supporting the workforce
The application period is open until 16 October 2020 at midnight.
This list of Frequently Asked Questions explains the NIA in more detail, who can apply, the selection process, what support an NIA Fellow 2021 can expect. We recommend reading this document before applying to the NIA or contacting us about your application.
Interested in applying?
Visit the NIA website to learn more about the application criteria and process, register for informational webinars, and access the online application portal. Webinars will be held on 8, 9, 22 September and 8 October.
On 5 March 2020, the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) announced 11 high impact innovations joining the national accelerator in 2020, including one developed here in the West of England: The WaterDrop. Read more about The WaterDrop and their journey to becoming an NIA 2020 Fellow.
About the NHS Innovation Accelorator (NIA)
The NIA is an NHS England Initiative highlighted in the NHS Long Term Plan. It accelerates uptake of high impact innovations for patient, population and NHS staff benefit, and providing real time practical insights on spread to inform national strategy.
The NIA supports individuals (‘Fellows’) with a set of values and passion for scaling evidence-based innovation to benefit a wider population, with a commitment to share their learnings.
Since launching in July 2015, the NIA has delivered the following (these stats do not include data from the latest rounds of Fellows, unveiled in March 2020):
2,214 additional NHS sites using NIA innovations
£134.8m external funding raised
486 jobs created
113 awards won
45 innovations selling internationally
NIA innovations save the health and social care system £38m per annum, according to conservative figures from independent evaluations by York Health Economic Consortium.
The AHSN Network, of which the West of England AHSN is a member, is planning a series of “Bridging the gap” events this autumn aimed at providing support, information and advice for innovators across industry. The plans have been developed following a roundtable discussion hosted by the AHSN Network to listen to the experiences and challenges faced by industry during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The roundtable, titled Lessons learned and lived experiences of industry during the pandemic – how these can help us reset health and care together, was primarily an opportunity to hear from industry. The group discussed how the views and experiences of industry could be taken forward and inform the NHS Reset process as we move into “phase 3” of the response to the pandemic. You can watch a short film summarising the event here.
In essence, the key themes of discussion around actions that need to involve industry insights to support reset included:
Effectively embedding new care/service models that have developed during the pandemic
Getting rapid evaluation and reimbursement models working more effectively, building on the lessons learned in recent months
Managing the consequences of the dramatic decrease in non-COVID care and considering digital interventions that can help manage patient care and outcomes.
Organisations joining the AHSN Network in this virtual roundtable included:
the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI),
the British In Vitro Diagnostic Association (BIVDA),
the Digital Health and Care Alliance (DHACA),
the Association of British Health Industries (ABHI),
Health Foundation,
Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC),
NHSX,
the Office for Life Sciences (OLS),
Spirit Health Group, and
the NHS Confederation.
Niall Dickson, Chief Executive of the NHS Confederation, said:
“The NHS has been through the most traumatic period in its history – we have seen some of most awful consequences of this terrible pandemic and some of the most fantastic responses from both health and care staff.
“We have seen innovation and its implementation at an unimaginable speed and scale that’s never been seen before, and we now urgently need to review what has happened and make sure we capture the positive transformations have been made possible by working with industry.
“We are keen for these relationships to continue and for us all to work hard to maintain this momentum.”
This event forms part of the AHSN Network work on supporting the health and care reset, ensuring that we work across both NHS and industry to sustain and maximise on potential advances and transformative ways of working.
A new King’s Fund report, part funded by the West of England AHSN, titled Technology and innovation for long-term health conditions uses four unique case studies to outline and discuss key themes of effective implementation of digital innovation.
AHSNs commissioned the King’s Fund to explore four different digital innovations in health services from the UK and the Nordic countries in order to demonstrate transformative potential and compare and contrast themes across geographies. The paper acts as a continuation of the AHSN’s commitment to learn from and take a collaborative approach to innovation transnationally with countries that form the Northern Future Forum (Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Iceland, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Sweden and the United Kingdom). This follows an initial Innovation Leadership Exchange event in September 2019, attended by senior leaders within health and care across the Northern Future Forum countries.
The paper also recognises the rapid uptake of digital innovation driven by the COVID-19 pandemic and outlines some of the questions services need to answer to sustain and implement digital technologies effectively going forward.
One of the case studies featured in the report is UK-based social enterprise, Patients Know Best who provide an online patient portal offering patients and health care staff a safe and secure way of exchanging information and giving patients access to their medical records.
One key feature of Patients Know Best’s approach is to put patients in charge, ensuring that they can access all the information about themselves in real time. Patients decide who else can access their information and allow new health care staff to join their team when needed, for example, when a GP or accident and emergency staff need to see their care plans.
Patients Know Best have been supported by a number of regional AHSNs since 2016 and has been adopted in more than 70 NHS trusts in England and can be accessed by more than five million NHS patients.
Other case studies include:
TeleCare North programme, which provides remote treatment for people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD)
Helsinki University Hospital’ remote diabetes monitoring programme for children
Huoleti app that connects patients with a support network.
The case studies illustrate the potential of digital technology to transform care, particularly through empowering patients, supporting stronger therapeutic relationships and effective teamworking across professional boundaries, and creating networks and communities to support patients.
Some key areas of discussion highlighted in the report include:
Responsive services for unpredictable diseases
Technology-enabled teamworking
Relationships enabled by technology
Collaborative design
Iterative cycles of improvement
The paper also calls on health and care providers to assess the impact on staff and patients of the rapid transition to online services driven by the COVID-19 pandemic, to ensure changes are fully assessed and to question whether there is scope to be more ambitious in redesigning services.
A new platform has been set up to support the drive to achieve 100,000 coronavirus tests per day by the end of April – the platform can be found here.
The platform is a partnership between the Department of Health and Social Care, the UK Bioindustry Association, British In Vitro Diagnostics Association and the Royal College of Pathologists.
In addition to scaling up existing technologies and channels, the government is looking for innovative solutions in specific areas. Solutions, ideas and comments can be uploaded to the platform, focusing on four key challenges:
Dry swabs for use in virus detection – availability of swabs is essential to speed up testing;
Transport media that inactivates the virus – increasing laboratory throughput and minimising processes including the need to handle test samples;
Desktop PCR equipment for Point of Care Testing – using machines that enable fast, accurate and safe results for the operator;
RNA extraction – new ‘ready to go’ methods of extracting viral RNA or enabling viral detection without an extraction step that can be integrated into PCR testing chains.
Every idea will be evaluated and all submissions will receive a response from the platform owners.
Registration is quick via an email address or by signing in with Twitter, Facebook, Google or LinkedIn. Whilst the system is ‘open platform’ to encourage sharing, contributions can be made confidentially through a private submission tab.
The platform will pause on the evening of Tuesday 14th April for an initial review of the solutions put forward.
