02.08.15
Innovation challenge prizes
Source: NHE Jul/Aug 15
Adam Hewitt reports on the latest round of NHS Innovation Challenge Prizes, including an interview with Emma Bownas, quality manager at one of last year’s winners, Greater Huddersfield CCG.
The NHS Innovation Challenge Prizes have helped neat ideas become business-as-usual, have identified and helped spread innovative practice, and promoted an overall “culture of invention” in the health service, according to NHS England.
A vast range of projects have won funding from the Prize fund over the last five years, from all parts of the NHS.
On 15 July, NHS England chief executive Simon Stevens launched the 2015-16 Prizes, totalling £150,000 (two-thirds of the funding coming from health company MSD, and a third from NHE England): a main Cancer Challenge plus a series of ‘acorn’ prizes for small innovations with the potential to make a big difference to patients.
Stevens said: “The NHS has the opportunity to become one of the fastest adopters of innovation in the world. These prizes are just one of a number of initiatives to support new ideas that will allow us to meet the challenges we face and to transform care for our patients.”
Other such initiatives include the NHS Innovation Accelerator and Test Bed programmes, the Vanguard sites for the New Models of Care and the Health and Care Innovation Expo in September.
One of the 2014-15 Innovation Challenge Prize awards led to a new referral system in Southend for patients suffering a mini-stroke, which has increased the number of high-risk patients being seen within 24 hours from 17% to 96%. If successfully adopted across the NHS, this referral system could save an estimated £116m a year, NHS England said.
Another award winner for 2014-15 was Greater Huddersfield CCG for a ‘red button’ early warning system for GPs to quickly and easily pass on quality issues or concerns directly to the CCG.
CCG quality manager Emma Bownas told NHE: “It came out of an idea in response to one of the recommendations in the Francis inquiry. When everything hit the news about Mid Staffs, GPs weren’t surprised because they all knew things weren’t right – but nobody had put it together to realise that every GP was hearing the same things. As a CCG, we decided that we needed to be listening to that ‘softer intelligence’.”
The ‘red button’ scheme isn’t intended to replace formal incident reporting direct to providers, but instead to act as an early warning system and to alert the CCG to overall themes and trends. Of the 38 practices in the CCG’s patch, 34 are using the ‘red button’ system, via simple software on the CCG’s own intranet. The Innovation Challenge funding, awarded to the CCG in February this year, is going to be used to help extend and further develop the software, to make the reporting system more sophisticated, and perhaps to work with neighbouring CCGs and public bodies to improve coverage.
Bownas said pursuing funding through the Innovation Challenge Prizes is “definitely” worthwhile, although the ‘Dragons’ Den’ style panel that faces shortlisted applicants asks some very searching questions. “It was a unique experience!” Bownas said. “But it was good and I think it’s helped raise the profile of the ‘red button’ in our organisation and with our GPs.
“It can be really simple ideas; it doesn’t need to be fancy. When we bid, we were only at 28 [practices using the ‘red button’], so we’ve seen an increase, and we’ve also seen an increase in the number of issues being reported and how many people are hitting the button.”
An NHS England spokesperson said: “As well as prize money, all winners will receive a tailored package of professional support from internal and external partners to help them develop their innovation and spread it across the system.”
Other recent winners:
• The Fitness for Work programme in Derbyshire, which has helped save an equivalent of £244,800 in sickness absence cost.
• A team of school nurses and young people in Leicestershire, who devised a safe and secure helpline using smartphones and texting for young people with self-harm issues.
• A team of bicycle-mounted paramedics in central London, who cut call-out times in high footfall areas. They were awarded £150,000 for saving 5,600 hours of ambulance time a year and generating savings of £1.5m per year, after costs.
• A group of physiotherapists in Kent who are using ‘artificial intelligence’ to screen patients with carpal tunnel syndrome.
• Staffordshire’s ‘Memory First’ project, which pioneered a joined-up approach to dementia care, cutting diagnosis times from three years to four weeks and providing cost savings of nearly £500,000 per year for a catchment area of 280,000 patients.
NHS England national director for commissioning strategy, Ian Dodge, said: “These are ideas you’d never get from behind a desk in Whitehall, and because they’re ‘made in the NHS’ they’ve got the very best chance of success.”