Shine 2012 Shine 2012 supported projects that developed new approaches to delivering health care through supporting patients to be active partners in their own care, improving patient safety, or improving quality while reducing costs

Shine 2012 provided health care 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 developed their innovations through activities such as change management, measurement and self-evaluation.

Shine 2012 projects developed new approaches to delivering health care 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.

Projects

The 30 Shine project teams came 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.

Each project ran for 15 months from the end of 2012, including a three month set up phase and 12 months to implement the project. Quality improvements had to be demonstrated within this time period. This tight timescale was set in order to ensure that successful innovations can be implemented rapidly and become widely available for public benefit as quickly as possible.

Learning

These projects gathered a wide range of learning about innovations that can be spread more widely to improve quality of care. The poster book for the awards can be downloaded.

Each team sought to demonstrate the practicality of an idea that could improve quality to a substantial number of service users and would, therefore, have a high impact when scaled up across the UK.