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Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement
The GM Health Innovation Accelerator programme is delivering a series of projects covering a range of disease areas. Each project has a focus on developing or deploying novel approaches to diagnostics and supporting more rapid and accurate identification and treatment of disease.
Through advanced analytics and access to health data through the GM Secure Data Environment, the projects aim to reduce health disparities among underserved patient groups and communities. The ambition is that this will improve health outcomes for people at high risk of disease, from the most deprived communities, and ultimately save lives.
The Co-Production and Engagement work stream is a cross-cutting theme across the programme with the overall aim of empowering the public, particularly those facing the greatest health inequalities. Engaging and involving people from socio-economically deprived and ethnically diverse backgrounds (including those experiencing digital poverty or exclusion) will help us better understand how we can increase access and uptake of advanced and community-based diagnostics amongst underserved groups moving forward:
Nicky Timmis, Public and Patient Involvement and Engagement Manager at Health Innovation Manchester said: “The innovation accelerator is all about tackling health inequalities, of levelling up but, we can’t deliver this in isolation from the people, patient groups and communities most affected. So public involvement and engagement is a cross-cutting theme, the golden thread throughout this programme and this will provide some of the insights and learning that can help us links projects together.”
As part of the Health Accelerator programme, we are also collaborating with commercial marketing and behavioural science company Mind Field Research and creative content agency By Gamers for Gamers. These industry partnerships will enable us to better understand health behaviours and harness innovative digital approaches to engage underserved communities to promote early diagnostics in healthcare.
Future public, patient involvement and engagement will contribute to the development of evidence-based outputs to inform a blueprint for future activity, projects or health research. The impact and lessons learnt from the GM Health Innovation Accelerator will play a vital part in informing future strategic priorities, funding applications and bids.
Click each heading below to read more about each project.
Building on the ID LIVER research project this piece of work aims to find and treat liver disease in patients much earlier. There is geographical inequality in liver health checks especially amongst those at high risk of the disease that are from ethnically diverse backgrounds or that live in areas of high deprivation. Mind Field Research will work to understand the health behaviours that influence low uptake and provide guidance around how patients can be motivated to engage so interventions can be provided much sooner, and when they will have the greatest impact.
The project team have developed a new approach to identifying those at risk of heart failure at a much earlier stage. This project has a particular focus on patients from socio-economically deprived and ethnically diverse communities, as they are at greatest risk of late diagnosis.
Digital assets to promote the study will be co-created with people who have co-morbidities which means they could potentially be at risk of heart failure. To do this, we will work closely with voluntary sector organisations that have relationships and insights around how to work best with these high-risk patient groups to help us plan and deliver activity. This collaboration will enable us to raise awareness and increase uptake in the study amongst underserved groups. It will also help us better understand the barriers and enablers to health care & participation in health research, amongst marginalised groups, more widely.
Building on the national Lung Health Checks programme, this project aims to increase uptake of targeted lung health checks in patients at risk of lung cancer. Raising awareness and increasing engagement around the benefits of early detection and treatment will help save lives.
Digital assets will be co-created in partnership with people from diverse backgrounds that are at risk of developing lung cancer but have low uptake in the lung health check programme such as current smokers. We also aim to gather insights around the barriers and enablers to health care & screening programmes more widely, to help inform new ways of working moving forward.
Working with the North-West Ambulance Service this project aims to explore the feasibility of introducing a diagnostic tool (Troponin testing) that is currently only used in hospital settings, to assess whether a patient is experiencing a heart attack. This has the potential to enable paramedics to make more informed clinical decisions and transport patients to the most appropriate location, optimal treatment and care in the future. The project will explore the views of paramedics alongside patients from a wide range of socio-economic and ethnically diverse backgrounds around the acceptability of introducing the Troponin test in an ambulance setting. It will also seek to understand any perceived barriers regarding the change to existing cardiac pathways from the public/patient perspectives.
As part of Greater Manchester’s Health Innovation Accelerator, Health Innovation Manchester and AstraZeneca UK are launching a feasibility pilot from North Manchester General Hospital to test the feasibility of remote spirometry. The project is called ASPIRE: ‘Access Spirometry Remotely in Greater Manchester’. The benefits of the programme are to be assessed through this phased approach. However, it is thought that the programme will be able to demonstrate that remote spirometry can be at least as cost effective to deliver, and easier to access, than services currently offered. This project is part of a joint working agreement between Health Innovation Manchester and AstraZeneca UK.
CKD is a long-term condition where the kidneys do not work as well as they should, and in Greater Manchester more than 10% of our population live with CKD. In less than 12 months, HInM managed a collaboration with Boehringer Ingelheim and The Care Lab to help the NHS understand the care of patients with CKD within GM, this co-design approach has been crucial to ensure we create solutions that can address the specific needs and priorities across GM.
By working closely with all our GM partners, and through the innovative development of a Primary Care engagement heat map, the team has recruited for and helped facilitate a total of 12 workshops, with attendance from up to 100 health and care professionals and over 30 patients and carers.
The team has captured some fantastic learnings around recruitment, engagement, information governance, industry processes and partnership working and are working closely with Boehringer Ingelheim and other partners to identify and map out opportunities for transformation across the CKD pathway.
Lipids Point of Care Testing (POCT) in High-Risk Communities is a project under the Greater Manchester Health Innovation Accelerator and its sub-programme the Advanced Diagnostic Accelerator.
Lipid optimisation aims to firstly assess the acceptability and effectiveness of delivering a community POCT service for total cholesterol (including direct LDL-C reading), within neighbourhood services across North Manchester. Funding, delivery plan and contract have been agreed, with community VCSE organisation staff to start POCT training in July 2024. The desired outcomes include 500 patients in total tested for identification of raised lipids by end December 2024 and generation of recommendations for novel, culturally and community appropriate, approaches to CVD health engagement and management.
The project utilises co-design with the project partners to design novel engagement pathways and practices and draws on lap standard assays and communication via community champions and use to tablets to feedback information to Primary care and to support new management pathways, patient referrals and management.
The DEVOTE programme is based on pharmacogenetics which is the study of how a person’s genes affect their response to medicines. Some patients have been prescribed medication that does not work well, whereas others develop reactions to their medicines. In the future pharmacogenetics could become a normal part of NHS healthcare leading to a tailored approach to prescribing based on a patient’s DNA. Engaging with diverse groups across GM we will seek to understand the views and perceived barriers associated with pharmacogenetics.
The Common Data Platform is a collection of digital assets and data generated from the Health Innovation Accelerator programme to accelerate and compliment data and processes from the GM Secure Data Environment (SDE).
Patient Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE), the second cross-cutting theme for the Health Innovation Accelerator programme, aligns closely with the Common Data Platform. By identifying gaps in our understanding of at-risk populations from available data, through PPIE we can engage with and capture greater insights about those populations, to complement the SDE and Common Data Platform.
By ensuring the data about our GM population is accurate and reliable, we can make better, informed decisions to improve outcomes and save lives in Greater Manchester.