Blogs

Integrated care is a key focus for all health and social care systems, yet efforts in the past to truly integrate care have often glanced over the importance of the wider determinants of health and the broader health of our local populations.  

Sometimes an offer seems too good to be true; that may seem to be the case for a set of innovations being provided for free to health providers across England.

Q landed in the North West Coast around twelve months ago, when the Innovation Agency welcomed over 100 eager recruits with a deep passion for improvement.

Sitting at my desk in Life Rooms Walton, I can trace the Life Rooms’ journey back to a ‘Your Voice, Your Change’ event at Aintree Racecourse in 2014, attended by over 300 Mersey Care service users and carers.

How can we challenge the status quo, and create conditions where it is safe for health and care professionals to reflect and learn from failure? How can we help leaders in organisations to ask themselves ‘is our approach to failure serving us well, and if not how can we improve?’

As Education Programme Manager for Liverpool Health Partners, I have the privilege to work with some amazing healthcare professionals and educators and none more so than with the Genomics Team, which resulted in our winning the Transforming Healthcare category in the North West Coast Research and Innovation Awards. 

When we think about innovation it’s easy to concentrate on cutting edge technologies like VR, gene therapies or Tesla cars, but what does innovation look like when the resource is people rather than technology?

Health care professionals, academics and innovators from HELIUM, a European partnership working on innovative solutions to health care problems, visited Liverpool to explore best practice – and were inspired to replicate the Innovation Agency’s Innovation Scout programme.

In the last year we saw an upsurge in the number of health innovations and in the ability of the NHS to adopt and embrace change and innovation.

At our last Engage Well event we explored its potential to transform the way health care is delivered when we use it to engage patients and public.