Shine 2012

In brief

If the health service is to meet the needs of a changing population while demonstrating value for money, we need to see more innovation. Many healthcare professionals have groundbreaking ideas about how to improve their services, but these ideas can only become good practice if they have the opportunity to develop, test and gather the evidence to support them.

The Health Foundation’s annual Shine programme seeks to address this need by supporting innovation designed to improve quality of care. It provides healthcare teams with funding of up to £75,000 to run and test innovative quality improvement ideas, as well as external expertise and support in assessing the impact and evaluating the effectiveness of their interventions. Project teams develop their innovations through activities such as innovation, change management, measurement and self-evaluation.

This year’s Shine projects are developing new approaches to delivering healthcare through one of the following categories:

• supporting patients to be active partners in their own care
• improving patient safety
• improving quality (as defined by the Institute of Medicine) while reducing costs.

The 30 Shine project teams come from a wide range of settings, spanning NHS, private and voluntary sector providers, some including partnerships with other types of organisations, including universities, consultancies and innovation intermediaries.

By the end of 2014 we aim to have gathered a wide range of learning about innovations that can be spread out more widely to improve quality of care.