In this blog, our new Associate Director for Strategic Partnerships and Delivery, Logan Ryan, challenges us to reconsider who needs an equal seat at the table when we’re planning how to transform health and social care services and unlock impactful innovation.
When we talk about the ‘system’, we often use the term as a catch-all for a large group of stakeholders. But do the people we serve and work alongside recognise themselves in that word?
Historically, we have defined a system as the health and social care providers and commissioners in a specific geography, with a particular focus on the NHS contingent covering primary care, NHS trusts, specialist tertiary services and integrated care boards (ICBs). Local authority commissioners and social care providers also get included in the ‘system’ definition, but one could argue this has not been to the same extent as their NHS / healthcare counterparts.
Although acting as influencers, contributors and enablers, we have not traditionally considered industry, academia and the voluntary sector a core part of the system, but rather representative of supply-side partnerships. Those we might describe as the innovators essentially have been held at a distance away from the system.
This is a situation we can and must address to enact meaningful change.
The growing system pie
I believe this framing needs to change as the ‘system pie’ is growing to include a wider range of stakeholders. As we respond to policy changes and the left shift – moving from hospital to community, treatment to prevention, and analogue to digital – the traditional definition of the system is no longer enough. We are moving towards a broader and more complex ecosystem of design and delivery of health and social care services, where coordination and collaboration are going to be the key that unlocks impactful innovation.
We must maximise opportunities to work with research partners as both developers of solutions and also generators of evidence and research that informs if, where and how we do health innovation. There’s huge potential for engaging universities more and collaborating in areas like public and patient involvement, and validation of solutions with the end user.
Engagement with academic partners is key to unlocking the potential of cutting-edge technologies like AI and quantum computing to accelerate achievement in the design and delivery of good care. Promising progress is being made in this regard with the South West Health and Life Science Cluster Development Initiative, which is currently mapping the potential of this sector in driving patient benefit and economic growth in our region.
Our voluntary and community sector has always been an asset to our public and patients, and now they need to be brought in proactively as an equal partner in delivery, not just a stakeholder who is consulted. They need to be involved in supporting the signalling of demand and need from the communities they serve and represent, co-designing solutions and collaborating on implementation in the real world.
This position is only reinforced by the shift from hospital to community, and rightly so. The traditional way of delivering care within the bricks and mortar of a hospital is not going to work on its own anymore. How can we build and deliver healthcare services that work for people where they are, in their neighbourhoods? Engaging directly with the public as patients, or through the incredible charities and community organisations across our region that represent them is key to that.
To make this work, we must move away from transactional relationships and look at how we level the power balance between the different partners I see as making up this new model of system collaboration.
Innovation as a verb
My role is all about ecosystem enablement, and so I tend to view innovation as a verb rather than a noun. It is not about individual interventions or solutions, but rather how we innovate – how we do innovation.
For example, how we organise and engage with the data architecture in our patch, such as utilising the South West Secure Data Environment to enable a clinical effectiveness group approach to the design and commissioning of services, and to establish the region as a mature, capable and trustworthy partner for research and industry collaboration. Or perhaps how we provide access to expertise and knowledge to upskill ourselves and our workforce with more of an innovation mindset and feel more comfortable with concepts of transformation and improvement through our West of England Academy offering.
To get this right, we can use a conceptual model of innovation. Curating a pathway from invention through to innovation and implementation, and on to improvement and business-as-usual, with a mechanism for signalling for future demand back to the invention stage to generate a pipeline of continuous improvement.
In my mind, every single stakeholder that we need to work with to get each of those steps right forms part of the ‘system’. As a health innovation network, we engage with different parts of the system at different times in that journey. They are all crucial roles within the development, validation, adoption and spread of good, high-quality, impactful health and social care innovation.
Moving toward a mission-oriented approach
I believe we will achieve more impact if we work in a more coordinated, synchronised and mission-oriented way. By this I mean:
- Signalling demand: using local data and the insights of people with lived experience to identify pressing needs, such as disparity in maternity outcomes, or variation in dementia care.
- Collaborative research: signalling these needs to academic partners so they can prioritise their research portfolios to target these specific clinical areas, and to industry innovators to ensure a pipeline of solutions which are being designed with need in mind.
- Test beds: utilising health innovation networks, trusts, primary care and social care providers as ‘test beds’ for these solutions.
- Scale: ICBs, trusts and local authorities being prepared and ready to commission these proven solutions at scale across their geography.
An invitation to co-create
We don’t have all the answers, and we aren’t trying to impose a single, fixed definition of what the system must be and who needs to be part of it. I hope we can nurture a system that invites in all those who have a role in contributing to the health and well-being of our populations – not just through medicine, but through social determinants like education, housing and employment. If this describes you, we want to hear from you. We want to co-create the way forward with our established partners and emerging ones.
If you think you’ve got a part to play, let’s start the conversation.
In future pieces, I aim to dive deeper into each of the elements I have touched on in this introduction, as well as take a look at some of the activity already underway to meaningfully engage with our ever-growing ecosystem, including partners from academia, the voluntary sector and local authorities.
Get in touch with me at logan.ryan1@nhs.net.
Image created using AI in Canva with the prompt ‘population, diversity, UK city skyline’
Posted on April 2, 2026 by Logan Ryan, Associate Director for Strategic Partnerships & Delivery
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