Innovation must remain at the heart of health and care

Leading healthcare organisations have stressed that innovation and learning must remain at the heart of health and care following the coronavirus pandemic.

A wealth of innovations and new ways of working have arisen in response to the coronavirus outbreak as leaders, clinicians and partners from all sectors have worked in novel ways to develop and deliver services under unprecedented circumstances.

But as focus increasingly turns to resuming ‘business as usual’, three healthcare bodies, NHS Confederation, the AHSN Network and the Health Foundation, have highlighted that the health and care sector will need to act quickly to capture and evaluate the range of innovations that have taken place and understand what it would take to sustain and scale them - before the opportunity to ‘reset’ service innovation is lost.

Forming part of the NHS Confederation’s NHS Reset campaign, the partnership between the organisations will build on their knowledge, expertise and reach to explore what clinicians, leaders, innovators and patients believe should be retained, adapted, reinstated or stopped, and for which populations or settings. It will also consider how the sector should collectively build on the rapid progress made to accelerate the reset and ongoing improvement of health and care planning and delivery.

Richard Stubbs, chief executive of Yorkshire and Humber AHSN, said: “The coronavirus pandemic has produced huge and rapid changes to the way that we deliver our health services. Not all of these transformations will, or should, endure but there are innovations made through the necessity of Covid-19 that will enable a more modern and flexible model of health care delivery. The identification, evaluation and, where appropriate, wide adoption of these innovations is where our work is focused.”