Blogs

To mark Mental Health Awareness Week, we’ve invited one of our innovators from the East Midlands Digital Health Accelerator, Tellmi Co-CEO, Kerstyn Comley to tell us about their digital peer support solution and their innovation journey.

• Tell us about the innovation. The what and the why?

The UK’s mental health crisis has created an unmanageable increase in referrals to mental health services. The predominant 1-2-1 counselling model cannot meet demand and this has led to ever-lengthening waiting lists and increased threshold for treatment.

Martin Hindle has served as the Chair of Health Innovation East Midlands (HIEM) since the organisation was set up in 2013.

As his fixed term appointment comes to an end – with a new chair to be unveiled in April – Martin reflects on some of the high points, and learnings, from his journey with HIEM over the past 10 years.

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Between 2013 and the end of March 2024, I have been privileged to have served as the Independent Chair of the Governance Board for Health Innovation East Midlands, one of England’s 15 local health innovation networks.

My fixed term of office is about to end and in the next few days HIEM will be announcing the organisation’s new chair, to whom I wish great success – I’m sure they will be as inspired as I have been by the positive impacts achieved by the organisation and the fantastic expertise and commitment of our team.

Amaka Ojiako, EMRAD/HIEM Innovation Lead tells us about her first year in the role, all that has been achieved and plans for the future.

The joint innovation lead roles began in 2023. Health Innovation East Midlands has offered two years of funding for the roles to each ICS and to the East Midlands Imaging Network (EMRAD) and the Mental Health Alliance for the East Midlands. The new roles will work jointly with HIEM and with their lead organisation to support the delivery of the innovation plans, navigate multiple sources of innovation to look out for opportunities, review innovations and facilitate adoption and spread.

The East Midlands Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) Senate is looking for new members to join its Senate from Lincoln and Lincolnshire. The patient and public involvement Senate is an independent body hosted by HIEM, it works to spread best practice through its member’s networks – extending its reach through the East Midlands health and care community. The Senate membership comprises patients and carers with strategic experience in patient involvement and the co-production of health and care services. The Senate provides expert input and advice to HIEM programmes ensuring that patient involvement and co-production are at the heart of the organisation.

In this blog Senate member Susan Edge shares her experience as well as pivotal moments from her time being part of the Senate.

Martin has served as the Chair of Health Innovation East Midlands (HIEM) since the organisation was set up in 2013.

He will be concluding his fixed term appointment at the end of March 2024, and in this blog, he reflects on HIEM’s journey and on the unique contribution that all local health innovation networks have made over the past 10 years.

Find out more about the role.

Find out more about Health Innovation East Midlands.

Watch a video about the role here.

In this blog, Health Innovation East Midlands Managing Director Nicole McGlennon discusses the considerations for successful adoption of innovative and transformative projects – from smaller initiatives through to major programmes being driven across organisations, sectors and geographies. 

Using the example of Focus ADHD – a three-year innovation programme adopted across England via the Health Innovation Network – Nicole summarises the critical success factors that have been captured in a new blueprint document “Innovation implementation, readiness and resourcing”. 

One thing the NHS has never been short of is pilots. How many of them “stick”? How many of them become Business as Usual (BAU) and, even better, spread to other services or organisations? 

It’s very difficult to pin down an accurate answer to these questions but the 2009 NHS sustainability guide suggested that up to 70% of all organisational change fails to survive. A great many of these change efforts are likely to be in the form of pilots. 

In this blog, Head of Innovation Pipeline Development, Suzanne Horobin, and Head of Innovation Programme Delivery, Tracey Jackman, look at value proposition in more detail and address a number of other factors that will have an impact on whether innovation can move beyond a pilot into spread and adoption. 

They discussed the themes in the blog in more detail at our Innovation Insights webinar on Tuesday 28th November.

My name is Shahnaz Aziz and I’m Head of Equalities and Involvement at Health Innovation East Midlands HIEM, (formerly known as EMAHSN). We connect and collaborate with health and care, patients and the public, industry, and research to discover, test and spread the best health innovation for our communities.  We encourage programmes to look at their work through an equality’s lens, and by doing so we hope to address and not widen inequalities. The voice of diverse patients and communities is imperative to this – otherwise innovations may not be acceptable, safe, or accessible for patients. 

The first of our Innovation Insights webinars launches on Wednesday 13 September with a session on involving people with lived experience to transform mental health services. The session links in with World Patient Safety Day 2023, which takes place on Sunday 17 September.

Deborah Wilson, who works in the Patient and Public Leadership and Equalities Team at the East Midlands AHSN, tells us more….

“Gathering high-quality evidence in ‘real-world’ settings to demonstrate the feasibility and practicalities of implementation is vital to enable rapid and confident adoption and scaling up of high-value health technologies that accelerate the delivery of patient benefits and healthcare efficiencies.” – AHSN Network Guide – Real-world evaluation to facilitate adoption at scale.