I love the NHS – it’s very special to me - so it’s an amazing honour to be in this new role.

I completed my medical training in Nottingham and worked in the NHS as an academic obstetrician for many years in the East Midlands and overseas. More recently I’ve worked extensively to drive the research enterprise and innovation endeavour from within our universities.

Within these roles, I’ve seen how research can lead to improvements in patient care further down the line, but this process can take a long time – too long.

This is where Health Innovation East Midlands and the other HINs across the country can really play a part in searching for and sharing the innovations that will make the most difference to our health and care services and to our patients; and working with local health systems to evaluate innovations quickly in real world settings and adapt and spread the successful ones quickly.

I believe that innovation is key to our health services being able to continue to meet the increasing demand being placed upon them. Staff cannot just carry on doing more of the same – things need to be done differently – radically differently in some cases.

My role as independent Chair here, will allow me to bring the networks and experience I’ve built over the years together with HIEM’s existing networks - to help the sectors work together to reduce barriers and speed up adoption and spread of the innovations that have been found to work well.

A key priority for HIEM is to build our collaboration with research partners – developing a ‘bench to bedside’ pipeline that maximises the potential for research outputs to be implemented.

We are building on and updating our knowledge of the research infrastructure – the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR), universities, NHS, MedTech and HealthTech incubator / catalyst sites etc. We are also linking in with wider partners including Midlands Innovation, Midlands Mindforge, Midlands Health Alliance and Leicestershire Academic Health Partners.

We are holding a series of workshops and discussions with different partners including NIHR East Midlands Clinical Research Network (CRN) and Applied Research Collaboration (ARC), the Nottingham and Leicester Biomedical Research Centres, and the universities of Nottingham, Loughborough and Leicester.

These will focus on who does what, and at which stage of the research pipeline they operate.

This scoping work will help to visualise the different parts of the research and innovation eco-systems so we can put in place a more formal process to connect these pipelines. Please contact us if you would like to be involved or kept updated on this.

There are some amazing projects already established in the region and some early-stage projects and innovations with vast potential – our task is to ensure that all our stakeholders are aware of what we are working on and how we can help – and come to us for support with their innovation and improvement projects.

When everyone is so busy this is no mean feat – but I’m looking forward to meeting with people across our local communities and health systems over the next few weeks and months to discuss how we can put these joint efforts to best effect and really make a difference to our local residents. Get in touch with Health Innovation East Midlands by emailing This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.