Blog

In this blog our Deputy CEO Kathy Scott looks back at the past 12 months and reflects on some of the highlights that emerged from our latest Impact Report. 

The publication of an Impact Report is always a pivotal moment for any organisation giving the opportunity to capture and reflect on the work done across the year.

The past year has been incredibly challenging. The pandemic has accelerated the pace of service transformations needed to ensure the safety of patients and frontline staff at an unprecedented rate. Like many organisations, we had to quickly adapt our services to ensure that, whatever the challenges, we could support the needs of our partners. We quickly realigned our service offer to be able to contribute to, and in some cases, lead activities as part of the pandemic response.

Working closely with our colleagues and partners across the North East and Yorkshire, we led on a programme of rapid insights reports for all three Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) operating across Yorkshire and the Humber to capture and evaluate what innovative solutions healthcare teams adopted in response to COVID-19. This work culminated in a series of recommendations and highlighted how the pandemic has shown us that greater devolved leadership; effective collaboration with all stakeholders to develop solutions; a mindset shift for patients and clinicians who have now experienced a new way of delivering care; and an understanding of the local context, are all critical factors to creating the cultural transformation we need to achieve sustained and effective change in how care is delivered and received in our region.

Our work did not stop here. We were also privileged to lead on the Health and Care Reset campaign on behalf of the AHSN Network that resulted in the publication of a new report published recently. Although the report focused on the experience during the pandemic, it offers recommendations based upon lessons learnt during the pandemic to help realise the vision for a more innovative health and care system of the future. This campaign complimented and built on the NHS Confederation’s NHS Reset campaign in conjunction with the Health Foundation, looking specifically at best practice and innovation in supporting the pandemic response.

Despite the incredible challenges over the past year, we have also seen some phenomenal examples of innovative solutions to help improve patient care. We were able to support our colleagues at our three ICSs as well as other partners in the NHS and industry to ensure these innovative solutions could be quickly adopted and spread to benefit patients and improve service delivery while contributing to increasing economic growth. Over the past 12 months, we have supported bids for funding that have resulted in over £5.3m of new healthcare investment coming into Yorkshire and the Humber and supported more than 350 companies to help them bring their innovations into the region.

Much of our work has focused on helping to keep people out of hospital and reduce the burden on frontline staff, for example:

• Our work to support the rollout of COVID Oximetry @Home saw an estimated 1,500 patients being able to self-monitor their COVID symptoms with pulse oximeters and detect early signs of deterioration with support from primary care.
• Through our work with NHSX, 14 organisations in our region are being supported to pilot Tytocare, a handheld medical device that enables patients and their carers to self-test for a range of acute conditions as well as monitor chronic conditions.
• Our collaboration with Humber, Coast and Vale Health and Care Partnership to introduce HN’s service to the region, will help up to 1,000 patients manage their long-term health conditions through a clinical coaching tool that uses artificial intelligence to help reduce the need for unnecessary hospital admissions.

What’s next

Over the next year, we will continue to support our local health and care systems to identify and address unmet needs, bringing in innovative solutions and brokering new relationships to support spread and adoption.

The impact of COVID19 goes beyond people’s health. It had heightened unemployment and inequalities in health and wealth in particular for the most vulnerable groups and minority communities. This has only increased the importance of our YHealth for Growth campaign, which we launched back in 2019 with our partners at the NHS Confederation and Yorkshire Universities. Our aim is to promote better understanding of the intrinsic link between health and wealth as well as raising awareness of the health inequalities in our region. This work has resulted in a series of recommendations to local and national leaders that were included in a positioning paper on the ‘Levelling Up’ agenda, published by the House of Lords’ Public Service Committee, after we were invited to a Lords’ evidence session to present our report’s findings. The paper has been sent to the Prime Minister and calls for ‘better targeted’ plans that protect health, education and skills in more deprived areas of the country.

We will continue to collaborate with our AHSN colleagues across the Network to multiply the scale and impact of our work, helping to further embed our current national programmes as well as identify other opportunities for the high-impact adoption and spread of innovation.

We will be supporting the AHSN Network on the implementation of its new strategy as well as driving forward our commitment to support a Net Zero NHS with the launch of a range of new initiatives such as our collaborative accelerator programme, Propel@YH Net Zero.

Our mission is to ‘transform lives through innovation’ and we will continue to strengthen our ability to work nationally, regionally, and locally to effectively pivot, cascade, empower and enable rapid transformation in what is set to be another monumental year for health innovation.

If you would like to know more about how we can support your project, you can find out more information in our latest Impact Report.