A new annual innovation award called Shine is being launched by the Health Foundation, giving an individual or a team in a healthcare organisation the chance to improve the health service by giving them 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 £75,000 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. So, we are delighted to be launching this new scheme called Shine which will give innovative ideas a chance to be put into practice and demonstrate how they will improve quality and deliver better outcomes.”
The selected teams highly innovative approaches will need to deliver high quality care more efficiently and will need to put their ideas and skills into an innovations trial to develop and test their thinking.
By being part of this award the Health Foundation will provide additional resource to support robust testing, ensure that successful innovations have a platform for national recognition and promote the most effective innovations to policy-makers and NHS leaders.
To qualify for this award there needs to be an innovative idea and the ability to pull together a team with experience in innovation, change management, measurement and self-evaluation. The teams can also incorporate individuals from various institutions and organisations.
The scheme will be launching on 1 September 2009. Deadline for applications is 12 noon, 27 October 2009.