Blogs

Steve Purdy is a Medtech innovator who founded Heads-Up Medical Solutions Ltd with the innovation Neuroguard. Alongside his day job as a frontline paramedic, Steve used evenings, weekends and annual leave to develop Neuroguard and secure funding.

Born from years of attending trauma cases, Neuroguard is designed to improve brain injury care in pre-hospital settings. The device enables correct head elevation while maintaining full spinal immobilisation, helping to reduce secondary brain injury and other complications.

Neuroguard was one of three winners as part of our Pitch Your Product: Medtech opportunity which offered a tailored package of support from expert partners.

November or ‘Movember’ is always a timely reminder of why men’s health matters. It’s a moment in the year when awareness grows, but more importantly, when taking simple, proactive steps can make a real difference.

Before diving into my personal experience, it’s worth recognising how much innovation is reshaping the way we approach health. Tools like the SiSU Health Station show how simple, accessible technology can remove barriers, create awareness, and make preventative health checks a normal part of everyday life.

I’d like to share a personal experience: the moment I used the SiSU Health Station at a staff meeting at work, and how that quick check changed my understanding of my own health.

Every year, around 60,000 babies in the UK are born prematurely—before 37 weeks of gestation*. They face increased risks of complications, and their families often navigate complex emotional and medical journeys.

At Health Innovation East Midlands, we’re proud to lead the Maternity and Neonatal Safety Improvement Programme (MatNeoSIP) across the region. Our mission is to support healthcare staff in delivering safer, more equitable care for mothers and babies—especially those born too soon.

On World Prematurity Day, Senior Improvement Lead Kate Hardiman reflects on the importance of improving care for preterm infants and highlight the progress being made across the NHS.

This ADHD awareness month, we are highlighting work we are leading to improve the care pathway for people with ADHD and support the identification, development, and use of digital technologies. 

The work will bring together insights and learning from people with lived experience, data, research, innovation, and clinical practice to explore how digital tools can help address current challenges for people with ADHD and the care pathways that support them.  

It supports the delivery of the national shift of health services from analogue to digital wherever possible, to help people access the support they need more quickly and improve outcomes.  

In this blog Tracey Jackman, Head of Innovation Programme Delivery at HIEM tells us more about the work and how we are using learning from our previous programme – Focus ADHD which improved ADHD diagnosis in children and young people. 

In this blog, Nicole McGlennon, Managing Director, reflects on the recent East Midlands innovation showcase event. She explores why health innovation is more important than ever and the conditions needed to make it successful.

On Thursday 18 September, we welcomed NHS leaders, innovators, and system partners to the East Midlands Health innovation showcase. The event was more than an exhibition: it was a platform to accelerate the adoption of proven innovations that can help transform health and care in our region and beyond.

There are several ways to approach a problem  - a common approach within patient safety is to put in place more restrictions in order to stop harm from occurring.

In this blog, HIEM Senior Improvement Lead and Nurse, Hannah Jackson-Cox describes a recent project, in collaboration with Leicestershire Partnership NHS Trust, that used QI approaches to do the opposite – while reducing incidences of self-harm by 40%. 

The project has been shortlisted for a HSJ Patient Safety Award.

Health is facing some big challenges that require the input of whole systems to solve, but when a problem is this big – where do you start?

In this blog, HIEM, Senior Improvement Lead, Kate Hardiman describes how we supported Joined Up Care Derbyshire to reduce harm from opioids for local patients, using a 7-step approach to working across whole systems.

The project, which has been shortlisted for the HSJ Patient Safety Awards, trained 80 Live Well With Pain practitioners, potentially saved five lives, and saw 131 fewer people prescribed high dose opioids and 306 fewer people with chronic opioid use.

The use of Artificial Intelligence (AI) has exploded over the past few years, and we are seeing it in use more and more. The landscape is changing rapidly, and navigating it can be tricky.

In particular for the NHS, Ambient Voice Technology (AVT), known as Ambient AI, is gaining interest within healthcare, with the Department of Health and Social Care recently describing it as a ‘gamechanger. Ambient AI is currently a hot topic for the NHS and how we can get the most from it.

We all know these are challenging times for our NHS.  Financial pressures, a population living longer with more years of ill health, the ongoing legacy of the pandemic, and the impact of recent global events over which we have no control, are a few of the issues that have coalesced to create a perfect storm.

As the health and care industry increasingly embraces artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, it is crucial to ensure that these innovations are implemented with the utmost care and responsibility.  Dr Hatim Abdulhussein, CEO at Health Innovation Kent Surrey Sussex, explores more in this blog.