As the only bodies that connect NHS and academic organisations, local authorities, the third sector and industry, we are catalysts that create the right conditions to facilitate change across whole health and social care economies, with a clear focus on improving outcomes for patients. This means we are uniquely placed to identify and spread health innovation at pace and scale; driving the adoption and spread of innovative ideas and technologies across large populations. Although small organisations – which ensures we remain flexible and responsive to emerging opportunities and challenges – we lead large regional networks. Our impact rests in our ability to bring people, resources and organisations together quickly, delivering benefits that could not be achieved alone.

Everything Health Innovation Networks do is driven by two imperatives: improving health and generating economic growth in our regions. We are the only partnership bodies that bring together all partners across a regional health economy to improve the health of local communities. We have a remit from NHS England to occupy a unique space outside of the usual NHS service contract and performance management structures. This enables us to foster collaborative solutions. We use our local knowledge and harness the influence of our partners to drive change on the ground and integrate research into health improvement. We are as interested in seeing healthcare businesses thrive and grow, creating jobs and bringing in investment to the UK, as we are seeing the healthcare system improve.

Each Network works within its own area to develop projects, programmes and initiatives that reflect the diversity of our local populations and healthcare challenges. However, we all share the following priorities:

• Promoting economic growth: fostering opportunities for industry to work effectively with the NHS
• Diffusing innovation: creating the right environment, and supporting collaboration across boundaries, in order to adopt and spread innovation at pace and scale
• Improving patient safety: using our knowledge, expertise and networks to bring together patients, healthcare staff and partners to determine priorities and develop and implement solutions
• Optimising medicine use: ensuring that medication is used to its maximum benefit – improving safety and making efficient use of NHS resources
• Improving quality and reducing variation: by spreading best practice we increase productivity and reduce variation, thereby improving patient outcomes
• Putting research into practice: our strong links with academia mean we are uniquely placed to support the translation of research into clinical practice
• Collaborating on national programmes: our unified programmes focus on delivery of the SBRI Healthcare initiative (supporting SME interaction), the NHS Innovation Accelerator, Patient Safety Collaboratives and medicines optimisation.

The AHSN Network, NHS England and the NIHR commissioned ComRes to conduct a survey that would provide a detailed understanding of the innovation and research needs at local level across all AHSNs. The findings of this project were used to produce an initial statement of innovation and research needs in each AHSN area.

These statements, alongside the regional and national report findings, will be used to facilitate further discussions at regional level, involving patients and the public and the research community, to develop and refine the priorities highlighted. Each AHSN region will publish a statement of local innovation and research needs. The initial statement for Health Innovation Manchester (April 2019) is below along with the national report and more information about the survey.