An insider’s guide to Health Foundation plans and opportunities in 2016

As we start 2016, we will be focusing on supporting the delivery of high quality health care and creating a healthier population in the UK – find out more in Jennifer Dixon’s latest blog. Here’s what to watch out for, plus some of the key opportunities to get involved in our research, improvement grant programmes, leadership development and events over the coming year.

Our plans for 2016

1.    High quality health care – some highlights

We’ll be recruiting to a new round of our improvement programme Innovating for Improvement, which will open for application in the summer, as well as our Spreading Improvement programme. We will also explore the use of social franchising and social investment as ways for spreading and sustaining successful health care interventions.  

Throughout the year we’ll invest over £7 million in grants to teams across the health service to take forward their improvement ideas as part of our Innovating for Improvement and Scaling Up programmes – following open recruitment calls run in 2015. We’ll also be thinking through how we can best support the service in future as part of a review into our existing improvement grant and fellowship programmes – ready to come back in 2017 with a renewed offer.

Some of our improvement programmes will draw to an end during 2016, such as Shared Purpose and Closing the Gap in Patient Safety. An important focus over the year will be to extract valuable learning and ensure we can share what works to improve the quality of care more widely.

Q, an initiative led by the Health Foundation and supported and co-funded by NHS England, is connecting people skilled in improvement across the UK. To ensure Q meets the needs of those doing improvement work, we have been designing it with the initiative’s founding cohort. The design of Q will continue in 2016, with phased opportunities to apply starting in the summer of 2016. Register here to receive updates on Q, including notifications about future recruitment.

This year we’ll be setting up an improvement research institute, building on the knowledge and evidence we’ve accumulated while developing the field of improvement research over the last five years. You can read a recent blog about plans here. We will also be recruiting to our Improvement Science Fellows programme in the spring of this year.

To continue to build and share evidence about high quality health care we will also be publishing a range of policy analysis and commissioned research. Highlights include:

• Devolution in Manchester: Updates and insights from our independent study of the Manchester devolution programme to be published throughout 2016.
• Workforce: A study of key trends and challenges facing the NHS.
• Quality strategy for England: We are working in partnership with Professor Sheila Leatherman to review and recommend how national policy can best support improvements in health care quality.
• Finance: We will publish our annual analysis of NHS providers’ finances in England, as well as studies on the impact of NHS financial crisis on hospital care, and a report looking at the potential impact of different policy decisions on the projected funding gap for the NHS in Wales.
• QualityWatch: We’ll continue to provide independent scrutiny into how the quality of health and social care is changing over time through QualityWatch, run in partnership with the Nuffield Trust.

2.    Building a healthier population

We are extending our work to look more broadly at the determinants of health – the factors that shape where we live, learn, work and play.

We want to influence how decision makers think about the health of people living in the UK and what they can do to support healthier lives. For too long, discourse about health has been dominated by the access and availability of health care services. There is now broad consensus that the real determinants of health largely sit outside of health care and that a wider set of resources will need to be mobilised to maintain and improve health.

With preventable illness widespread and health inequalities deep rooted, a radical update is needed to how governments approach the health agenda. By looking at best practice and evidence from the UK and abroad we will identify and support approaches that can help people to maintain good health and prevent illness.

Given the breadth of the challenge we will collaborate and work in partnership with others where we feel that our collective knowledge and expertise can be combined to greatest effect. By the beginning of 2017 we will be kicking off our work in this area and by 2018 we will have a portfolio up and running. Read more about our work on population health.

One of the first things we’re looking forward to:

• Together with the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation we are hosting a session of the Salzburg Global Seminar in 2016. Hooked on health care: Designing strategies for better health runs from 16-21 January.

Get involved: Here are 4 ways we can help you this year

1.    Funding for improvement

Sign up for alerts or keep an eye on our newsletter to find out when the following improvement grant programmes are open for application in 2016:

• Innovating for Improvement: We’ll be running another round of this hugely popular programme, with the next open call for applications scheduled for summer 2016. Grants of up to £75k are available to test and develop innovative ideas and approaches to improving health care delivery and/or the way people manage their own health care in the UK.

• Spreading Improvement: This programme supports projects that have already demonstrated local benefit to spread their work to other settings. We’ll be inviting applications from teams we’ve previously funded who we think have the potential to widen the impact of their projects. We’ll be distributing up to £400k through small and large scale grants over the year.

2.    Events and learning opportunities

We will be live streaming from some of our major events in 2016, so if you can’t join us in person you can be there virtually. To hear about our forthcoming events, sign up to receive alerts.

We’re also planning a programme of webinars with international partners, looking at topics ranging from new models of care to population health management. We will also continue to host webinars that share learning from our research and improvement work.

A highlight will be our new annual event, which will consider the challenges facing the sector and look at how to create change.

Look out for our exciting new project to create an immersive experience at events throughout the year. We will be showcasing stories of people working within health and social care – you will be able to walk a mile in someone else’s shoes while listening to their story. Our aim is to foster empathy between people in different parts of the health care system.

3.    Leadership development opportunities

We’re continuing to invest in developing individuals’ leadership skills through our funded fellowship programmes. Open for application in 2016 are:

• Improvement Science Fellows: These fellowships support people to spend up to three years developing original, applied research dedicated to improving health care in the UK, while also continuing with clinical practice. We’ll be selecting up to five new fellows in spring 2016.
• Harkness Fellowships: We will be funding a place on the Harkness Fellowship programme. We will select UK fellows in 2016, together with the Commonwealth Fund and NIHR.

4.    Stay up to date and use our resources

For all the latest news and developments from the Health Foundation, including alerts about the latest funding and fellowship opportunities, you can:

• subscribe to our monthly email newsletter
• register for email alerts to be notified when new content is available in your areas of interest
• take part in conversation and debate about current health care issues on our blog
• follow us on Twitter, Facebook or LinkedIn
• visit our resource centres on patient safety and person-centred care for useful tools and information
• read the latest improvement research in our publication BMJ Quality and Safety, produced with the BMJ.