In 2022-23, we have continued to support our local health and care systems with delivery of the digital-first offer outlined in the NHS Long Term Plan.

Our projects have focused on helping innovators to navigate the digital ecosystem, using digital technologies to improve patient care and deliver more flexible and equitable health and care services, as well as harnessing digital capability to establish new ways of working and improve workforce wellbeing.

In the last year, we created and launched our Digital Resources Hub which supports innovators, researchers, health and care staff, and AHSN teams on their innovation journey, from concept ideation through to funding and implementation.

Whether you’re looking to understand national guidance on digital health technology, or discover training opportunities for you or your team, our Digital Resources Hub provides a central repository which is easy to access and navigate. Watch our short video to find out how to navigate the Digital Resources Hub; we'll take you through the main sections.

As part of our wide range of structured and systematic support, we continue to deliver the Innovation Exchange to identify, select and encourage the adoption of innovations with the potential for health transformation, and to strengthen economic growth in the Wessex region.

Our offer is tailored to the needs and development stage of each innovation, complementing regional and national system priorities.

During 2022-23, we connected innovators with health and care staff facing specific challenges, providing support to over 260 companies. Of this number, over 100 innovators have each received more than five hours of support.

In collaboration with our colleagues at North East and North Cumbria (NENC) AHSN, we led on the delivery of the new NHS Innovation Service from NHS England’s Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC). The initiative provides a central point of access to coordinated support and guidance from organisations with expertise in the development and widespread adoption of health innovation, and helps innovators get their innovation to clinicians and patients faster.

Health Innovation Wessex economic growth 2022-23:

During 2022-23, the work of our Insight team has included evaluations commissioned by our members and other organisations, regional commissions from NHS England, and real-world validations of early-stage innovations.

In the last year, we have produced six independent evaluation reports, which were published and shared with commissioners, and had 78 interactions with innovators, equating to more than 2,300 hours of support.

Additionally, we hosted ten new monthly Insight Evaluation Surgeries, offering regular opportunities for innovators to consult with experts in the team.

Over the last year, we have reported key findings and made recommendations for commissioners and providers on three primary care digital demonstrators, long Covid services, virtual wards, and cultural intelligence and inclusivity training.

We also continued a joint programme of work with the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) Wessex to deliver the NHS Insights Prioritisation Programme (NIPP), which seeks to understand the impact of innovations for the digital remote monitoring of deterioration, particularly in people living with frailty.

As evaluation partner to Dorset Innovation Hub, we provided workshops for staff on evaluation and implementation and collected data to understand its impact, including a baseline survey of attitudes to innovation (Health Innovation Wessex ATIS survey) for reporting in 2023-24.

Over the last year, we have helped organisations to implement a learning health system approach, enabling us to drive improvement and generate lessons for the adoption and spread of innovations by the NHS.

In 2022-23, we continued to support the creation of learning health systems through our wide experience and expertise in understanding and interpreting data, evaluating impact, and gathering insights from patients, staff and the public to enable rapid and innovative change.

Our ongoing work has supported learning health and care systems, as well as learning research and innovation ecosystems, to improve discovery, sustain development, and accelerate deployment through improvements to culture, processes and capabilities.

Over the last year, we have continued to drive the adoption and spread of innovation for a healthier Wessex, supporting development of the Dorset Innovation Hub and the Wessex Secure Data Environment.

Alongside this, we helped Wessex Health Partners move into its next phase of development, with the appointment of its Chair, Professor William Rosenberg, and its Managing Director, Christine McGrath.

“Wessex Health Partners brings together diverse partners from a range of academic disciplines across our universities, and from all parts of the health and care system across Wessex – from supporting wellbeing and enhancing our work to prevent ill health, to innovation in physical and mental health services, to the latest advances in genomics. William’s experience of and personal commitment to facilitating complex partnerships is an excellent fit with our Partners’ vision of building a learning health and care system.”

Dr Paul Johnson
Chief Medical Officer for Dorset NHS Integrated
Care Board

CVD is also the largest cause of premature death in deprived areas, and is a major contributor to the excess mortality that has occurred since the Covid-19 pandemic.

In its Long Term Plan, the NHS identifies reducing the incidence of CVD as the biggest area where it can save lives over the next ten years.

Our CVD programme improves patient care and health outcomes for the Wessex population by supporting our local health and care systems with the early detection, prevention and management of CVD and associated cardiovascular events.

By optimising treatments and innovations, we can better support those living with CVD to self-manage the condition, as well as prevent 150,000 strokes, heart attacks and cases of dementia in the next decade.

In 2022-23, work with our health and care partners has centred on the identification and management of patients with hypertension, familial hypercholesterolaemia and CVD.

As well as facilitating the adoption, spread and evaluation of innovations and novel therapies, we have focused on developing the knowledge and skills of health and care staff across Wessex, which has included the delivery of educational events and the production of training resources and materials.

“We do really value the Health Innovation Wessex team’s input and hope to continue working with you on CVD into the future.”

GP specialising in CVD and public health

We add value to the frailty agenda and innovation activities in Wessex, retaining focus on the spread and adoption of innovation across the region.

With our shared commitment to both slow the onset and reduce the severity of frailty, we work with partners to develop and disseminate tools and approaches for improving patient care.

In 2022-23, we progressed collaborations with our local partners, as well as those in our regional and national health and care systems, continuing to identify and promote best practice through our audit work and improvement projects.

For example, we worked in partnership with two NHS Trusts, Hampshire Hospitals and South Central Ambulance Service, to review the innovative north Hampshire falls and frailty car service, and consolidate learning into an Urgent Community Response Frailty Service Toolkit, which can support the spread of the model across England and help ambulance services to deliver the national urgent community response target.

The falls and frailty car service and toolkit were subsequently nominated for two prestigious Health Services Journal (HSJ) awards, and adopted by the Skills for Health Urgent Community Response Capabilities Framework.

We also worked with our expert frailty clinical leads and representatives from our Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) to co-design and develop our novel Wessex frailty virtual ward translator tool, which aims to support system partners to optimise their frailty virtual ward delivery offer.

Additionally, we published the findings from our 2022 Health Innovation Wessex Proactive Care audit, which was produced in collaboration with the ICBs for Dorset and Hampshire and Isle of Wight. The audit, which consists of 58 responses from ICB colleagues and representatives from other health and care organisations, highlights innovative best practice and opportunities within proactive care provision to support ICBs with future planning.

We have continued to work with local systems and innovators to identify areas of opportunity to support individuals living with frailty. This includes supporting the NHS Insights Prioritisation Programme (NIPP) in evaluation of the use, applicability, and acceptability of digital remote monitoring for individuals living with frailty within the community. Working with our academic partners, we organised six community engagement listening events across Wessex in 2022-23, allowing us to gather feedback from those with lived experience.

In 2022-23, our medicines optimisation programme has continued to support patients across Wessex to get the most from their medicines, reducing problematic polypharmacy and improving the processes around repeat prescribing.

Through its core principles of population health management, public behaviour change, and education and training, our polypharmacy programme aims to improve patient outcomes and medicines safety.

In 2022-23, we continued to focus on supporting people to take their medicines correctly, alongside helping to avoid patients taking medication unnecessarily and addressing the wastage that this causes.

Through ongoing collaboration with our local health and care systems, our programme continues to support our workforce to identify at risk patients and prioritise them for a structured medication review.

Electronic Repeat Dispensing (eRD) is a way of dispensing prescriptions electronically. It can benefit patients who take the same medication regularly by enabling their prescription to be sent straight to their pharmacy, meaning they do not need to visit their GP every time.

eRD also has benefits for our health and care system, reducing workload for prescribers and enabling better management of the medicines supply chain.

Despite this, we identified key barriers to eRD in Wessex, including limited understanding of the benefits, a lack of national resources to support successful setups, and no champions to drive the change.

Our eRD programme was set up to address this, and delivery continued throughout 2022-23. This includes the provision of regular training (action learning sets) for our health and care workforce, alongside chairing the Wessex eRD steering group, which meets four times a year.

In 2022-23, the programme has helped release over 7,000 GP hours in Wessex.

“Due to many problems with the buses, plus difficulties obtaining doctors' appointments, I find it helpful. Plus, I find it saves my GP work […] thus saving the delivery service time, effort and expense, hopefully helping the NHS, too.”

Patient using eRD in Wessex

Working collaboratively with innovators and partners across our health and care system, we support the spread and adoption of innovation within mental health, speeding up the sharing of good practice.

In 2022-23, we have continued to support and deliver the national programmes for eating disorders and neurodevelopmental services, identifying variation in mental health outcomes and helping our health and care systems to harness innovation to address challenges.

This includes delivery of Focus ADHD, a programme which supports our NHS mental health trusts and community paediatric services to improve the assessment and diagnosis of attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) for children and young people.

The programme aims to increase the number of children and young people who have an objective assessment (QbTest) as part of the clinical pathway, standardising practice and providing a clearer, unbiased clinical picture.

Since it began in April 2020, it has benefited over 55,000 patients, and has also led to a 19% release of clinical time in paediatrics, as well as 9.2% in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Service (CAMHS).

During 2022-23, we also continued to deliver FREED, a programme which supports mental health teams to accelerate the diagnosis and treatment of eating disorders in young people using an innovative model designed to enable rapid access to specialised support.

The programme has benefited almost 300 patients in the south east and Dorset since it began, and is being delivered at eight mental health trusts across the Wessex, Oxford and Kent Surrey Sussex AHSN footprints.

“I would say that going to treatment actually saved my life, really. I was told by my doctor I wouldn’t make it through my twenties if I carried on in the way that I was acting, so I think that early intervention in eating disorders is so crucial. You don’t want to waste your life… you do deserve to get better.”

FREED service user
Sussex Eating Disorder Service

Over the last year, we have continued to use our experience and expertise to support partners across our health and care system. We have worked collaboratively to improve patient safety and achieve the objectives set out in the NHS Patient Safety Strategy, building on the foundations of a safer culture and safer systems.

In 2022-23, we focused on five priority SIPs (systems; managing deterioration; medicines; mental health and maternity and neonatal) and developed and matured our Patient Safety Networks as the main route for delivering these programmes.

Over the course of the year, we held 16 events and webinars with a total of 553 attendees, bringing together NHS providers, commissioners, patients and health and care staff to share learning, best practice and enable system-wide safety improvements.

Within our managing deterioration SIP, we supported our systems to sustain deterioration management tools in 481 (54%) care homes in Wessex. We also achieved over 1.2 million views of the suite of videos which support RESTORE2, a physical deterioration and escalation tool for nursing and care homes. The tool was co-produced and co-designed by the Wessex Patient Safety Collaborative and West Hampshire Clinical Commissioning Group (now part of Hampshire and Isle of Wight Integrated Care Board).

Within medicines safety, we delivered the first year of our workplan, which included the development and completion of the Opioid Prescribing Comparators Dashboard in collaboration with the NHS Business Services Authority (NHSBSA). The dashboard aims to support general practices and Primary Care Networks (PCNs) with understanding their opioid prescribing and identifying patients at risk of harm. Additionally, we produced three podcasts with our health and care experts to showcase local improvement initiatives that have contributed to reducing opioid prescriptions.

We continued our partnership with our Integrated Care Systems (ICSs) and Integrated Care Boards (ICBs) in Dorset and Hampshire and Isle of Wight (HIOW), identifying challenges facing the wider primary and community care community and ways to address them.

This involved prioritising areas of need and opportunity, as well as supporting the adoption and spread of new and proven innovations and new ways of working to fundamentally improve patient outcomes and the efficiency of clinical services.

2022-23 saw the completion of the Self-Care Demonstrator Site Project, which allows general practices and Primary Care Networks (PCNs) to trial emerging technologies or market-ready innovations without making a long-term commitment. These structured short-term pilots also benefited innovators, helping them to test their products in a real-world clinical setting and generate insights into usability to inform future development.

Driving digital transformation within primary and community care was a key focus for 2022-23. In January 2023, we supported health innovation company, xim Limited, and HIOW ICS to provide a blood pressure checking service at a shopping centre in Basingstoke for members of the public receiving their Covid-19 booster vaccine. The service used a new technology called Lifelight to identify people with high blood pressure (hypertension), who were then advised to contact their GP. Lifelight works by allowing smartphone or tablet devices to measure blood pressure, pulse and breathing rate simply by looking into the device’s built-in camera for 40 seconds.

We also continued to work alongside Assura plc to deliver on our multi-year commission from HIOW ICB to research and evaluate innovations that could be placed within the Health Hub, a dedicated space which will be part of the new St Clements Partnership general practice building in Winchester. Construction for the new surgery began in March 2023, following approval from Winchester City Council and HIOW ICB.

“We are delighted to see St Clements Surgery break ground and move forward with their new premises. This project has been a great example of collaborative working between practice staff, primary care, system commissioners, specialist developers, the local authority and public stakeholders. Health Innovation Wessex is proud to have supported the practice to identify innovative ways of working to encourage the wellbeing of staff and improve the experience for patients.”

Nicola Bent
Deputy Chief Executive Officer, Health Innovation Wessex

Strategic partnerships and business development

By working collaboratively with health and care partners, we maximise the impact we have for our stakeholders, and help bring benefits to patients faster.

This year, we have continued to seek and establish new strategic partnerships, whilst strengthening and growing existing ones. This includes Health Innovation Wessex’s role as joint chair of the formal partnership with the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE), as well as collaborations with the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) Wessex and the NHS Digital Academy.

This will support us to develop and implement a coherent and ambitious strategy for business and new product development in the coming year, enabling us to diversify and expand income sources.