Blogs

Martin Hindle, Independent Chair of the East Midlands Academic Health Science Network talks about the latest public health data.

Recently, Public Health England (PHE) released the health profiles for 2016. It is an excellent resource which holds a huge amount of valuable health and socioeconomic statistics for England. As the Independent Chair of EMAHSN I was particularly drawn to the granular nature of information for the East Midlands region and the common health trends within the data.

Dr Cheryl Crocker, Regional Lead Patient Safety Collaborative, EMAHSN. 

Cheryl summarises the recent 'State of Care report', the CQC annual overview of health and adult social care in England which was published on 14 October 2015. Cheryl also talks about how our work at the East Midlands Patient Safety Collaborative is already contributing to improving safety across our region.

Peter Bates, former PPL lead at EMAHSN recently visited friends in Burkina Faso, West Africa. Peter decided to donate some of his leaving collection (from team members) to the community he visited. While there met Lynne Smith from Scotland. Lynne is qualified as a dentist and keeps up her continuing professional development when she returns to the UK, but her main home is in the town of Kaya, some 60 miles north of Burkina’s capital city of Ouagadougou. Amongst a range of initiatives, Lynne’s dental project highlights some themes that are relevant to innovation in healthcare in the UK.

Prof. Jos Schols MD, PhD from the Dutch LPZ team in Maastricht gives his views and feedback on this annual measurement of the prevalence which first started in the Netherlands in 1998 and is now being trialled by the Eats Midlands Patient Safety Collaborative.

Prof. Murray Anderson-Wallace, Expert Advisor, EMAHSN Patient Safety Collaborative gives an overview of the appointment of the first Chief Investigator of the newly formed Healthcare Safety Investigation Branch (HSIB).

Dr Adam Gordon is Clinical Associate Professor in Medicine of Older People at The University of Nottingham and an Honorary Consultant Geriatrician at Derby Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust. He tweets @adamgordon1978

Here he describes a project to benchmark and report the prevalence of care problems in UK care homes.
Care homes do a lot of good work. There are almost three times as many beds in UK care homes as there are in National Health Service hospitals. Care home residents are amongst the most vulnerable members of our society.

Karen Glover is the Director of Partner Relations for CLAHRC EM and Head of Clinical Programmes for EMAHSN. Karen has held senior management roles including Director of Nursing and Compliance with the East Midlands Ambulance Service.

Here she describes how, after nearly 25 years in the NHS and 11 years off the frontline, she recently went back to working as a nurse on the Castle Ward, a 24-bedded trauma and orthopaedic rehabilitation ward for older people at Lings Bar Hospital, Gamston, Nottinghamshire.

In September, we jointly hosted a highly energised and productive session with UCLPartners at one of the Pop-up Universities at NHS Expo. Our group had a lively debate about what is innovation, what enables it, and what barriers we might need to overcome in order to spread and diffuse our innovations. The positive message we received was that innovation can come from anywhere and anyone in your organisation.

We wrote up some notes following the event, based on participants' direct feedback and wanted to share these along with the presentation we gave on the day.

Further to being successfully awarded a British Academy’s Newton Mobility Grant, last week Dr Lucy Sitton-Kent and Dr Reena Devi, both University of Nottingham research fellows on EMAHSN projects, met with Miriam Cristina M. S. de Paiva PhD nurse, Departamento de Enfermagem da Faculdade de Medicina de Botucatu-UNESP, Cristiane H. Gallasch, Adjunt Professor - Faculty of Nursing - Rio de Janeiro State University Dr Andreas Xyrichis, Lecturer, King's College London for a qualitative workshop here in the East Midlands and London.

Have you seen the announcement from the Small Business Research Initiative for Healthcare (SBRI Healthcare) where up to 12 small business could each benefit from £100,000 Phase 1 product development funding?  In this latest round, SBRI will look to award a total of £1 million for ideas from companies focused on addressing challenges in older people with multiple-morbidities and specifically in the problem areas of: Falls, Incontinence and Decline in Functional Ability.

SBRI Healthcare is an NHS England funded initiative to develop innovative products and services that address unmet health needs, they works with Academic Health Science Networks to identify priority areas where technology can be applied to address major clinical challenges. The programme focuses on clearly identified NHS needs, bringing clinicians and business together at an early stage to harness the expertise of SMEs to develop effective solutions. Companies successful in the six month feasibility stage (Phase 1) are eligible to move on to more detailed product development and NHS validation where up to £2 million in further funding support can be secured across two additional phases.