Hello. My name is Richard.
I’m passionate about innovation and the impact that it can have on our health and care. I represent the Yorkshire and Humber Academic Health Science Network (AHSN). We are an organisation that exists to transform health through innovation.
I was delighted to be asked to write the blog for this week’s leadership message because I believe that innovation is everyone’s business, and that our region has such a wealth of talent and opportunity to help us deliver exceptional and innovative health and care.
At the AHSN our job is to work with the NHS, research bodies and the health industry to accelerate the use of ground-breaking innovation into the front line of the NHS. It is a privilege to spend time with world class clinical and academic leaders, genius innovators and empowered patients, all of whom are contributing to producing game changing innovations that will revolutionise the way that we deliver and afford services for future generations.
Given this abundance of innovation, why does the AHSN need to exist? Unfortunately, too often improvements in care do not leave the boundary of a ward, hospital or healthcare community. There are many barriers and not enough incentives for innovation to make the leap to cross sectors and geographies. That’s where AHSNs play a role. Our mission is to help the NHS to “adopt and spread” these innovations in a way that ensures that every patient in the NHS benefits no matter which hospital or which GP practice they visit. As William Gibson said, “The future is already here — it's just not very evenly distributed.”
So what kind of innovation are we working on? Lots! So what kind of innovation are we working on? Lots!
There are 15 AHSNs across England, and we work both locally with our NHS partners, and nationally with each other to discover, evaluate and spread everything that can demonstrate a significant return on investment to the NHS in terms of value and better patient outcomes. In our first 5 years we introduced over 330 innovations to over 11,000 different locations benefitting over 22million patients. Sadly, space doesn’t permit me to cover more than a couple of examples, but you can see much more of our work on our AHSN Atlas
Work such as:
COPD is a long-term respiratory condition (most commonly known as chronic bronchitis and/or emphysema) that is among the top five causes of death and the second most common cause of hospital admissions. MyCOPD was created by an NHS respiratory consultant who is also a fellow on our AHSN NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) programme. It is an online self-management system that corrects 98% of patient inhaler errors without clinical involvement and doubles the rate of recovery from acute exacerbations. A CCG with an average COPD population of 5,000 patients would expect to make savings in the first year alone of over £200,000 if deployed to 60-80% of their COPD population.
DrDoctor is an online digital outpatient platform that greatly empowers patients by giving them more control and information in a two-way dialogue with their hospital. Where it is being used, attendance at outpatient clinics has increased by 40% and waiting times have reduced by 3 weeks. The platform saves the average hospital trust over £2.2million per year and DrDoctor estimate that they have so far saved over 7,000 years of patient waiting time!
The AHSN is a part of the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership. Working with Martin Barkley, CEO of Mid Yorkshire Hospitals NHS Trust and the innovation CEO lead for the Partnership we are rolling out a programme of innovations together and with individual NHS organisations. Over the next two years we will be working on many priority programmes together, including:
- Atrial Fibrillation (AF) - A quality improvement programme for GP practices with the most opportunity to prevent AF related strokes. Prescribing anticoagulation to 25 patients for 18 months prevents 1 seriously debilitating stroke. Our AF programme identifies more people with AF utilising Mobile ECG devices. By doing this we increase the number of AF patients who receive protective anticoagulation.
- Connect with Pharmacy (Transfer of Care Around Medicines -TCAM) - When some patients leave hospital they might need extra support taking their prescribed medicines. When patients in hospital are identified as needing this kind of support, they are referred through TCAM to their local community pharmacist when they are discharged. This reduces hospital readmission rates and increases quality of life for patients.
- PreCePT - At a cost of only £1 per dose of magnesium sulphate to mothers in preterm labour, PReCePT is transforming lives by preventing cerebral palsy in babies – avoiding a £5 million cost to the system during the person’s lifetime.
- Emergency Laparotomy Collaborative - This involves the spread and adoption of the evidence-based Emergency Laparotomy Pathway Quality Improvement Care (ELPQuiC) bundle within NHS trusts. The programme brings together dozens of staff – from emergency departments, radiology, acute admission units, theatres, anaesthetics and intensive care - with collaborative learning events. It seeks to improve standards of care for patients undergoing emergency laparotomy surgery, reduce mortality rates, complications and hospital length of stay, while encouraging a culture of collaboration and embedding quality improvement skills to ensure sustainability of change.
There is more. Much more! Please do look at our AHSN Atlas and our AHSN website to find out more about our work. You can also follow us on twitter @AHSN_YandH. We are passionate about making all the great innovation that we work with available to everyone in our local communities. But we can’t do that alone. Innovation is everyone’s business, and we’d really love your help.
Thank you and have a good weekend.
Richard
What else has been happening this week?
West Yorkshire and Harrogate Healthy Hearts
The West Yorkshire and Harrogate Healthy Hearts project group met on Monday and is making good progress. The Project held its launch event on September 7th, bringing together place-based clinical, project and communication leads, along with key stakeholders from Public Health England, British Heart Foundation, National Diabetes Programme, and Community Pharmacy West Yorkshire. Together colleagues worked to understand the scope, and plan the work.
Since the launch event clinical and project leads have been working to engage clinicians in primary and secondary care to develop the project at local level. Communication leads are meeting on Monday to begin work on a website to support the project. A task and finish group has been established to understand how community pharmacists can support the success of the project.
Key to the project is developing tools/facilities once and then sharing these – reducing duplication. Presently, these include developing clinical searches, a dashboard to measure success, and a hypertension medication protocol.
To find out more about the project please contact Pete Waddingham, the Programme Manager - pete.
Primary care carer’s event
West Yorkshire and Harrogate, Health and Care Partnership (WY&H HCP) shared their vision and aspirations for unpaid carers, including young carers, living across the area at a special event in Leeds on Tuesday. Over 60 health and care professionals working in primary care including GP practices, social care and the community sector attended the event to find out how they can contribute to the WY&H HCP vision for unpaid carers. You can read more here. The presentations from the event are here.
Primary care network meeting
Colleagues from the primary and community care programme board met on Tuesday to consider the proposals from each of our six local places (Bradford District and Craven; Calderdale, Harrogate, Kirklees, Leeds and Wakefield) around using the £2.6million development fund to develop primary care networks/communities and the wider package of support. The leadership of the programme will be writing to each of the local place leads this week regarding the next steps.
West Yorkshire and Harrogate Health and Care Partnership Public Health Co- ordination Group
The group met on Thursday to discuss improving health outcomes for people with CVD (including heart disease) and diabetes, tobacco data and funding. There was also an update on workforce and communications. The meeting was chaired by Dr Ian Cameron.
What’s happening next week?
Shadow System Leadership Executive Group meets on Monday.
The Joint Committee of the Clinical Commissioning Group meet for a development session on Tuesday.
Chaired by Dr Andy Withers, the West Yorkshire and Harrogate Clinical Forum meets on Tuesday.
There is a West Yorkshire and Harrogate leadership meeting on Tuesday afternoon – this is chaired by Rob Webster, our CEO Partnership Lead.