Become a shining example for your healthcare organisation

Shine has been launched by the Health Foundation and is giving healthcare workers the opportunity to prove their ideas work to improve quality and reduce costs.

In the current financial climate, cost improvements are going to be a key focus of healthcare organisations. This award will be looking for ideas from a clinical team that can tackle the challenge of improving high quality care and reducing costs.

To help tackle this, the first Shine challenge for 2009 will be: What new approaches to delivering healthcare can maintain or ideally improve quality while also saving money?

Good ideas only become good practice when there’s an opportunity to develop, test and gather evidence that they work. Therefore, the Health Foundation is investing in an annual 12 month programme with £75k in each of 18 teams from across the health service: commissioning, primary care, acute care, mental health and beyond.

Jo Bibby, Director of Improvement Programmes at the Health Foundation said, ‘We know that there are some great ideas out there in the health service about how to improve it, but often these ideas do not spread because people don’t have the resources to prove they work.

‘We are delighted to be launching Shine, which will give innovative ideas a chance to be put into practice and demonstrate how they will improve quality and deliver better outcomes.’

To qualify for this award you’ll need an innovative idea and the ability to pull together a team with experience in innovation, change management, measurement and self-evaluation. The teams can incorporate individuals from various institutions and organisations.

Deadline for applications is 12 noon, 27 October 2009.