Blogs

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.

Shahnaz Aziz, Head of Equalities and Involvement at Health Innovation East Midlands (HIEM) discusses the importance of Patient and Public Leadership in health care transformation, as well as a great opportunity to join our team as a Public Involvement and Equalities specialist. 

October is Cholesterol Awareness Month, which seems a great opportunity for us to share details of HIEMs CVD Prevention programme and remind healthcare services in the East Midlands of the support HIEM can offer.

The NHS Long Term Plan states that the biggest area where the NHS can save lives over the next 10 years is in reducing the incidence of cardiovascular disease (CVD).

CVD affects around seven million people in the UK and is a significant cause of disability and death. CVD is responsible for one in four premature deaths in the UK, with those in the most deprived areas almost twice as likely to die from CVD.

In this blog, Health Innovation East Midlands Managing Director Nicole McGlennon reflects on the ongoing outstanding impacts of a former national programme to accelerate the diagnosis of ADHD – and identifies some of the key learnings relevant to any NHS transformation project. 

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.