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Phil Jennings is the Medical Director and Deputy Chief Executive at the Innovation Agency which covers the North West Coast and is one of the other 14 Academic Health Science Networks.
Phil provided an overview of his role as Medical Director and his views on the importance of that clinical role to strengthen sustainable adoption and spread of innovation within the health and care system.
East Midlands AHSN is currently seeking a Medical Director to join our Executive team and lead the delivery of our Patient Safety Collaborative and Medicines Optimisation programmes. For more information, please visit the join our team page on our website (closing date: 14 September 2020 ).
I have worked for the Innovation Agency for nearly four years now. In my role, I lead a team to deliver our Patient Safety and national adoption and spread programmes. In our organisation (as with all of the AHSNs) the clinical and the commercial go hand-in-hand – our aim is to spread proven and worthwhile innovations which will really make a difference in our health and care system and therefore the clinical voice and perspective is imperative.
I am a GP by background and still practice, undertaking one clinical session a week. I have worked in various management and leadership roles throughout my career for different parts of the health and care system including Wirral Primary Care Trust, Wirral Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) as Chair, the Clinical Network and more recently for NHS England. Working in these varied roles has helped me gain a good understanding of the architecture of the NHS, which is pivotal to the work I undertake and the work of the wider organisation.
As I work in the realm of health and care innovation, something I am commonly asked is ‘does this have legs?’ The fact that I can navigate the system really helps to answer that question. For example, from an innovator point of view sometimes (not always) there is often a misunderstanding of the way products and services are commissioned. An understanding of the commissioning process and landscape is useful here. If I was asked the same question within my organisation or by a colleague within the health and care system, my knowledge of patient flow through the system, the treatment process and the overall timings and mechanics of this and the complexities, also helps me to answer that question from another angle.
In my opinion, one of the most useful things I do as Medical Director is acting in that navigator role, and this is true of the AHSNs as a network, by brokering relationships between the NHS and industry. We are able to help innovators understand the most appropriate person to speak to in our area. With our health and care colleagues we play a coordinating role, by explaining what the innovation is, how it will work, what it will cost and giving a roadmap as to how this would be deployed in the local system. Then working with partners and companies to getting it rolling.
If someone comes to me with a problem and I go back to them with a suite of potential solutions, it so much easier to achieve adoption and spread – which is why Innovation Exchanges can be so valuable (the AHSN process of addressing a pressing regional health and care challenge which is informed by our stakeholders and then presenting a number of tried and tested solutions to consider and potentially take on as a demonstrator).
At the Innovation Agency we follow a structured approach to assessing innovations and programmes of work, we have regular Innovation Curation and Assessment Panel meetings which involves members of my team, our transformation team and commercial team. We meet on a monthly basis and go through different approaches and different innovations and whether these should/can be taken forward or where we can signpost, add to our Innovation Exchange or speak to research partners about it. Throughout the process it has become very clear there needs to be at least one clinical voice that can give that grounding and recognise immediately if that could add value to the system.
Sometimes innovators come to us with a solution that doesn’t have a problem or their problem is very, very niche and won’t be recognised by the system as an immediate need. Rather than finding places to put innovations, it’s our job to filter out those innovations that actually meet the needs of the system. I feel the fact that I am still clinically facing, is important as I work as the bridge in the opposite direction too – conveying frontline pressures and needs.
At a Network level, I am part of a recently established Clinical Executive group which acts to look strategically at how innovation works and fits within the health and care system – which helps to influence the direction of our collective organisations. There are a diverse range of clinical voices from across the AHSN Network which is great to shape and influence what we adopt and spread across the different AHSN regions.
“As an agency we don’t deliver innovation, we support our partners to deliver innovation”
The role that we have in bringing together the commercial sector and the NHS acting as navigators and coordinators is just that; as an agency we don’t deliver innovation, we support our partners to deliver innovation.
The NHS is so busy, everybody on the frontline has their day consumed by seeing patients and there is very little headroom to focus on innovation. We are in the privileged position that we are able to step back and think about doing things differently and better. It’s difficult (almost impossible) to take an afternoon out in an acute trust to redesign a pathway. So our role can be to do that for our health and care partners. We can help them embrace what is down the line and do the analysis and horizon scanning on their behalf. It’s hard to point to another part of the system that does that in the way that we do.
Having a clinical perspective helps me recognise that finding this time is a challenge. I can use my experience to establish what those on the frontline might need help collating and bringing together to understand the value of the potential change.
I particularly like the immense variation of my role day-to-day. Our work covers the entirety of the health and social care system, for example some of my work is with GPs and then other community practitioners, secondary care, tertiary care and social care – few people can genuinely say that they are able to work across this many areas of the system. It’s extremely interesting and helps you understand how the system is integrated.
In my previous roles, I felt a very long way away from policy. The AHSNs are very close to policy and have a much more direct line to influencing this nationally, which I didn’t recognise or fully appreciate before I started. It’s a really privileged place to be and supports that we can make a difference long-term.
The AHSNs’ work is wider than the health and care system and works as a bridge between health and care, industry and academia. I am not an academic by background, but my role has enabled me to understand the academic side of what we do and appreciate how that interconnects – for example bid writing, commissioning and supporting research etc.
Some of the work I’m proudest of has been the changes that we’ve achieved with some of the national AHSN programmes. Across our region we have seen some big successes on programmes such as PINCER, Transfer of Care Around Medicines (TCAM) and PReCePT which wouldn’t have happened if our organisation wasn’t involved. Using PReCePT as an example, short for PReventing Cerebral Palsy in Pre-Term labour, we worked with maternity units in our region on this quality improvement project supporting the uptake of magnesium sulphate administration in pre-term births to prevent cerebral palsy. Before we took on the project, the administration rates were around 30-40% depending on the maternity unit and have now increased to around 85% – preventing multiple cases of Cerebral Palsy and directly improving the quality of life of those children and their families. For me this is the most rewarding part of our role as you can see the real difference that you’ve made and you can clearly understand your role in that.
We will continue to champion the clinical voice to achieve even greater traction with our innovations and I hope to further the impacts we make for the health and care system and ultimately for the patients we serve.
Phil Jennings, Medical Director and Deputy Chief Executive, Innovation Agency North West Coast