Innovation Unit and the Health Foundation have published a joint report on new approaches to implementation of health care innovations

The report’s authors identified a shortlist of 10 innovations that have successfully spread across the NHS in recent years. From these, they have drawn insights into how scale might be more effectivelly pursued and supported in the future.

The report poses a set of considerations about what should be done to change the way innovations are supported to spread and scale across the NHS. In particular, we argue that system leaders and policymakers need to understand and respond to the following:

• The “adopters” of innovation need greater recognition and support. The current system primarily rewards innovators, but those taking up innovations often need time, space and resources to implement and adapt an innovation in their setting.
• It needs to be easier for innovators to set up dedicated organisations or groups to drive scaling. Scaling innovation can be a full-time job for an individual, and difficult to do alongside frontline delivery. Often dedicated organisations are needed to consciously and strategically drive scaling efforts, including when innovators ‘spin out’ from the NHS, and innovators may need support to set them up.
• System leaders need to take more holistic and sophisticated approaches to scaling. Targets and tariffs are not a magic bullet for scaling; while they can help, they don’t create the intrinsic and sustained commitment required to replicate new ideas at scale. System leaders need to use different approaches, including articulating national and local healthcare priorities in ways that create strategic opportunities for innovators and using commissioning frameworks to enable rather than hinder, the sustainable spread of innovations.

See full details here.

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