Celebrating five years of Health Innovation Manchester

CityLabs

Throughout October 2022, Health Innovation Manchester is celebrating its fifth anniversary of its launch as Greater Manchester’s Academic Health Science Network.

Over the past five years, Health Innovation Manchester has been at the forefront of transforming the health and well-being of Greater Manchester 2.8 million citizens. The mission has always remained the same – to become a recognised international leader in accelerating innovation, working alongside stakeholders to discover, develop and deploy new solutions, whilst addressing health challenges and inequalities.

Partnership is at the core of Health Innovation Manchester’s portfolio of work and through strong relationships and collaborative working, expertise from across the system has improved the delivery of care at pace and scale.

To commemorate this anniversary, Health Innovation Manchester has spoken to various contributors to the organisation and to members of the Board, to find out what working with an Academic Health Science Network has meant to them.

Please click each tab below to reveal the quotes:

“I’ve worked at Health Innovation Manchester (HInM) since its creation, having joined the GM AHSN in 2016. As the Chief Nurse / Chief Nursing Information Officer I am in a privileged position to work with clinical colleagues across GM and with all the teams within HInM. My role involves ensuring the quality and safety aspects of innovations are really understood and that enhanced quality and safety are built into the design of any new innovations. I also champion developing innovations based on clinical, patient and/or carer problems that are supported by data. This ensures we are focusing our collective efforts in the right areas. Critically it enables a clearer understanding of the contribution any given innovation makes to improving care for patients and that the health and care workforce in GM can easily adopt it.

All this is possible because of HInM’s staff who have a range of complementary skills and abilities to take a problem, develop a solution and embed it into a health and/or care pathway. The current financial and operational pressures in the NHS have never been greater which means the deployment of innovations is much harder but equally never more important. I’m looking forward to maximising all the opportunities that collaboration can bring and continuing to make a difference for our communities and the health and care staff supporting them.”

“The most striking feature of Health Innovation Manchester has been the very strong spirit and effectiveness of collaboration and partnership across all the members from different sectors in the region.”

“Health Innovation Manchester has made huge and impressive progress in its delivery of projects and programmes. The introduction of a renewed pipeline process enables change and product to get to market in a controlled, auditable and dynamic way whilst the implementation of the Microsoft Project (MSP) management tool has raised the bar for both project managers and for the presentation of status and reporting at senior, executive and portfolio level. It has been a privilege to work in an environment which has not only embraced change but one that is now working effectively with it and in doing so represents a leading approach to delivery in this field.”

“Working with the people at Health Innovation Manchester has been a pleasure. Every day is a school day”

“Since joining Health Innovation Manchester in early 2018 I have seen the benefits and added value in bringing together our AHSN and AHSC. This was strengthened in 2019 with the addition of the ARC and the successful re-designation of the AHSC in 2020. This combination of expertise enabled us to rise to the challenges presented by COVID-19 and HInM has evolved into an integral part of our Integrated Care System that will be instrumental as we continue to respond to the needs of our populations.”

“In the past 5 years we have seen the emergence of Health Innovation Manchester (HInM) as a collaborative organisation and flexed to reach system priorities during a global pandemic whilst building the digital infrastructure for the long term. As Medical Director I am charged with keeping our patients safe and allowing the workforce to be fully engaged in prioritisation.

Some innovative successes are the testing of pathways for population health implementation, digital integrated services to offer support to a caring workforce and pts in a nursing home setting and the creation of the GMCR and the various care plans within it which will revolutionise care.

I look forward to the next 5 years stabilising delivery through innovation.”

“I was one of the original members of Manchester CLARHC, later Manchester ARC which led to being a Public Contributor at Health Innovation Manchester. I have been involved in some really important and insightful research projects and other activities at HInM over a number of years, contributing to and being part of an Innovation Funding Panel being just one example of genuine collaboration with public contributors. The patient and public involvement manager and her team have always warmly welcomed us and our views, opinions and insights have always been sought and valued.”

“Through the Patient and Public (PPI) forum I have been involved with researchers at Health Innovation Manchester on several very practical projects. One project researched how to streamline hospital Accident and Emergency services. Another was assisting with an Accident and Emergency plain English questionnaire. These were simple pieces of work where the researchers benefited from the PPI group’s input. I also report to the PPI panel about more detailed research. I am very interested in various research projects that investigate how new digital technology is providing health innovations in Greater Manchester.”

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