Starting in 2023, NHS Bristol, North Somerset and South Gloucestershire (BNSSG) Integrated Care Board (ICB) and Health Innovation West of England collaboratively designed and delivered an exciting programme to accelerate the adoption and spread of innovation across Healthier Together – the local integrated care system (ICS).

The Innovate Healthier Together Programme was established to support the ICB to take full advantage of innovation in achieving their ambitions to change lives and improve health, wellbeing and care for the populations they serve.

Programme objectives

Innovate Healthier Together had multiple objectives:

  • Developing innovation mindsets and culture.
  • Supporting the identification of innovation opportunities and the adoption of innovation into practice – ‘Innovation Pull’.
  • Identifying innovations with a strong evidence base and establishing the conditions for their adoption – ‘Innovation Push’.
  • Creating an enabling innovation infrastructure.

Innovate Healthier Together Fellowship

As part of the programme to support the objective to develop innovation mindsets and culture, we launched the Innovate Healthier Together Fellowship in May 2024, a community of innovation pioneers and change-makers from across BNSSG.

The aim of the Fellowship is to provide a space to connect individuals with diverse skills from different parts of the health and social care landscape with common interests, ultimately providing opportunities for collaboration, to spark ideas and develop these into actionable solutions to drive better health outcomes and reduce health inequalities.

The Innovate Healthier Together Fellowship is a community dedicated to reimagining health and care across BNSSG. It serves as the go-to-network for both new and established health and care innovators with a passion for improving health outcomes across the region.

Fellows benefit from access to mentors, regular workshops and seminars to share knowledge, enhance innovation and quality improvement skills, and support networking and connections across the community.

“The Fellowship gives us the opportunity to do things differently. We now have the chance to create a community that will support each other, be brave enough to innovate, to test, fail, and learn from that. In the end, it’s about doing things better. This Fellowship is a group of people that can start us off on that great journey.” – Professor Sir Steve West CBE, Chair of Health Innovation West of England

Find out more about the Innovate Healthier Together Fellowship.

Innovate Healthier Together development programme

In association with colleagues from the West of England Academy, we have developed the Innovate Healthier Together development programme – a three-module accredited course to develop participants’ skills in design thinking, quality improvement and facilitation. We delivered this training to two cohorts of ICS colleagues in 2024.

Understanding attitudes towards innovation in health and care

Colleagues at NIHR ARC West have completed a bespoke research project to better understand the attitudes and behaviours of ICS leaders towards innovation in health and care. The findings of this research has supported system-wide thinking on the development of an Innovation, Improvement and Transformation Framework which will include a Leadership Compact and Development Programme to help develop thought leadership and practical solutions to lead innovative teams.

The programme also actively supported teams deploying innovations into practice. We were a key partner in the rapid deployment of the Living Well with COPD project, funded by the Health Tech Adoption and Acceleration Fund HTAAF, contributing to the evaluation and thinking around future models of this proactive care project.

We engaged with locality partnerships and other ICS-wide groups, such as the Integrated Care @ Home Board and other multi-disciplinary teams. We supported them with design-thinking techniques to co-produce innovative solutions to some of health and care’s most challenging service provision issues.

Get in touch

If you would like to know more about the Innovate Healthier Together Programme, please email healthinnowest.ihtfellowship@nhs.net.