NHS Innovation Expo has been an annual event since 2009. This year, on Sept. 2 and 3 around 5000 people a day from health and care, the voluntary sector, local government, and industry joined together at Manchester Central Convention Centre for two packed days of speakers, workshops, exhibitions and professional development.
In 2015, almost 12 months after the publication of the NHS Five Year Forward View it was also a great opportunity to check on and learn from the progress of Greater Manchester as the area prepared to take over a £6 billion devolved health and social care budget, while delegates were able to meet the people behind the 37 vanguards developing and testing a range of new models of modernised care.
NHS England Chief Executive Simon Stevens announced major new work to support NHS staff to improve their own health and wellbeing, with specialist packages for GPs suffering signs of burnout, while Secretary of State for Health Jeremy Hunt MP challenged the NHS to ensure all patient were able to access their full medical records online by 2016, accompanied by a commitment to a review of data security (copied from the NHS England site: for more information click on this link: http://www.england.nhs.uk/expo/expo15/ )
EHFF was invited to attend by the NHS National Clinical Director for Innovation, NHS England, Prof. Tony Young to hear the launch of the new Clinical Entrepreneurs programme, an entirely new concept designed to enable clinical staff to develop their technological and commercial skills whilst undertaking their professional training. For more detail click on this link: http://www.innovation.england.nhs.uk/en/clinical-entrepreneur
Our view: although Innovation has been talked about a lot in the NHS, there are some signs that real progress could be made via recent initiatives. The first is the setting up of a series of Academic Health Science Networks in 2013. An NHS Confederation briefing paper on this subject is here (click-on 1). Secondly, the NHS Innovation Accelerator was launched in January 2015. For more details click here http://www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/innovation/nia/
Let’s watch this space!