Persuasive Numbers: Lessons Learned in running Innovation Programmes

Speaker: John Loder, Young Foundation

QIPP Room Facilitator: Michael Hewitt

The workshop was designed to focus on ideas for how clinicians can take advantage of opportunities for, understand barriers to, and be aware of the skills required for productive Innovation.

While the NHS has a great history of innovation which has improved clinical outcomes, using innovation to increase productivity has generally been more of a challenge in reality. With budgets unlikely to rise over the next few years, the service needs to change to make a real impact on quality and cost.

So, in the workshop, we discussed the lessons learned from the East Midlands Regional Innovation Fund for how the quality of care was increased whilst also increasing quality, productivity and generating cost reduction.

We looked at areas and techniques that had been promising, including integration across a whole patient pathway, using simple and established technology, and promoting self care.

We discussed barriers to innovation including lack of incentives, lack of buy-in and lack of access to specific skills and knowledge.

We then went on to discuss the specific skills needed to establish an overall case including a simple overall argument, robust measurement, conservative and defensible assumptions, and tailoring your case to the specific stakeholders.

A lively discussion also covered a number of other topics, including: the best way to communicate what is going on in innovation across the NHS, concluding that a hierarchy of levels of detail was useful; how to build in longer term and strategic argument into one’s case for an innovation, and the skills gaps that innovators had across the NHS.