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“Innovation designed into patient care” Clatterbridge publishes innovation strategy

The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre NHS FT has published its first innovation strategy, to outline how innovation is set to be designed into patient care.

The three-year plan highlights how the trust will generate new ideas, introduce solutions, improve ways of working, develop a culture of innovation, support adoption, and introduce methodology along with a roadmap to facilitate innovation.

“Innovation is everyone’s job” the strategy states, with three strategic priorities defined to guide the trust over the next three years. These overarching areas focus on developing a culture of innovation, how to nurture new innovation, and ways to support adoption.

On developing a culture of innovation, the strategy notes: “For The Clatterbridge Cancer Centre to be truly innovative, we need staff and patients to share their challenges and ideas; it is from these challenges and problems we regularly face that innovation arises.”

It continues to highlight areas to promote a culture of innovation, to include engaging through collaboration events, launching innovation funding, incorporating innovation in staff’s personal learning and performance appraisals, and promoting good innovation practices.

The next priority defines a process to act as a methodology to support ideas through five stages: to generate and collect ideas, evaluate them, define and refine the idea, test and prove, and to scale and adopt. “The innovation team will establish a framework to assess and select projects for further development based on their potential, feasibility and alignment with the trust’s strategic objectives and priorities, ” the strategy notes.

For supporting adoption and innovation, the trust adds that they “will provide faster access to novel treatments and innovative ways of working, optimising patient outcomes and experience”. This includes a new assessment framework to validate solutions and the creation of a  “commercial evaluation service to support the validation and subsequent adoption of newly developed products”.

The strategy summarises to say “the next three years will see a step change in innovation across the trust”.

To view the innovation strategy, please click here.