The Health Foundation is looking for star individuals or teams to participate in Shine – a new annual award focusing on innovation.
Each year the charity will be looking for ideas that tackle a key challenge to high quality care.
Examples of smart thinking from across the health service are being sought. For its part, the Health Foundation will provide:
• The resources to test and evaluate a team’s idea;
• Ensure that successful innovations have a platform for national recognition;
• Promote the most effective innovations to policy-makers and NHS leaders.
It will invest £75,000 in each of 18 teams from across the health service: commissioning, primary care, acute care, mental health and beyond. People with the best innovative ideas and the skills to put together an innovations trial to develop and test that thinking are asked to come forward.
This year’s challenge
This year’s Shine challenge is: Find new approaches to delivering healthcare that will both improve quality and save money.
In the current financial climate, cost improvements are going to be a key focus of healthcare organisations. By stimulating thinking, ideas and action among healthcare professionals, new innovative ways to release cash – while not losing quality – can be tested in practice. The best ideas will go beyond the well-tried approaches to improving efficiency and instead, will use radical innovation to deliver better outcomes through different inputs and processes.
The deadline for applications is 2 November 2009. To apply, please visit the Health Foundation website.
