A banner for Norfolk & Waveney ICB's Research and Innovation team, with NWICB and NWICS logos

Innovation

Innovation is central to addressing the challenges facing our health and care system. Innovation is a broad term, and to us, means new ways of doing things which could be a new technology or treatment, a new service or an existing service in a new setting. The ICB has a statutory duty to promote innovation in the provision of health and care services.

We know that innovation tends to improve healthcare and potentially leads to services being more cost-effective. We believe it is important to champion new ways of working, where needed, to ensure our services are more reflective of changing needs.


What we do

Innovation culture and learning 

Developing and nurturing an integrated innovation culture across a system is an evolving process but we aim to position the importance of innovation as a central, shared concern. We use a multi-level approach across the system to grow innovation capacity, this includes a system-wide vision for innovation, sharing of innovation across teams and providers, upskilling staff across all levels, and working with external organisations to help us grow an innovation culture.   

We host and facilitate an innovation network and provide learning opportunities across the ICS to support collaboration and sharing of innovation needs, solutions and projects across teams. The aim of this network is to accelerate the use of innovation across the ICS through partnership working.

Innovation implementation and evaluation

Identifying innovation needs, matching them to suitable innovations that are safe and impactful to our local population and then implementing these, can be a complex process. We work with ICB/ICS teams to help them identify innovation needs and then work with partners and innovators to match innovations to the identified needs. We will support due diligence processes to ensure that innovations are implemented as effectively and safely as possible.

Implementation science principles and strategies are used to support the adoption, evaluation, spread and sustainment of innovations into practice where these are deemed safe, impactful and provide value to our local population and the system.

Innovation - Guidance toolkit

We have created an Innovation Guidance toolkit which provides a step-by-step toolkit that can be used to guide the implementation of innovation, from the identification of an innovation need through to implementation of innovation and evaluation of its impact. This toolkit is a living document which we are currently piloting, and it will be amended based on both our experiences of using it and feedback from our Integrated Care System colleagues.

 

The toolkit aligns with the first three stages of the Norfolk and Waveney Integrated Care Board innovation pathway. It can be used independently to assist you to consider how innovation might meet a particular need or overcome a challenge within your organisation. It is also used by the Innovation Team to guide conversations with Integrated Care Board and Integrated Care System colleagues, allowing us to work with organisations to refine a need or challenge and consider how innovation might support with overcoming this.

 

The questions in this toolkit are a guide, and it is not expected for all questions to be answered. It has been designed to help individuals and organisations start thinking about how to move forward with the introduction of innovation in an identified area.

Innovation - Resources

We have created a document to bring together information about useful resources relating to innovation which you can access here. The document is organised into three sections:

To help you to get started with learning more about innovation, we have picked out the following links from our document that contain further sources of support with innovation. Please access our linked document for a comprehensive list of resources that are suitable for a range of audiences.

Timothy Clarke

Head of Innovation

Gigi Moller

Innovation Project Manager