Needs Assessment Service: a collaboration between Health Innovation Wessex and Health Innovation North East and North Cumbria

In this blog, Ben Porter and Gemma Snell, Needs Assessment Leads for the NHS Innovation Service, share their insights from the NAS Strategy Away Day in June and celebrate the significant milestone of supporting over 700 innovators.

Health Innovation Wessex (HIW) in collaboration with Health Innovation North East and North Cumbria (HI NENC) manage the Needs Assessment Service (NAS), an essential first-step assessment for all innovators who register with the NHS Innovation Service. An innovator who comes to the NHS Innovation Service will receive a bespoke and expert analysis of their needs through NAS, and are referred to a number of relevant organisations who can provide advice or support to progress them along the Innovation Pathway*.

On Monday 24th June 2024, HI NENC travelled down to sunny Southampton to meet HIW for their second strategy away day to discuss current progress and future plans. It was a great opportunity to have the team together physically in the same room, as the last time this occurred was October 2022. Being physically together in the room with laptops away, and able to be fully present in body and mind is a powerful connection point during strategic planning that beats hours of virtual conversations.

The strategy day covered the following topics:

• Working and learning styles
• ‘What works well’ and ‘even better if’
• Contingency planning and reviewing a new standard operating procedure
• Quality assurance process and how it maintains equality, diversity and inclusivity
• Communications and events to promote the service locally

Over the past two years, NAS have assessed over 700 innovations through the NHS Innovation Service which includes national and international innovators who span the entire Innovation Pathway. Many of these innovators will have also received their first contact with a health innovation network too, as NAS aims to refer an innovator to their local health innovation network, or refer them to a specific health innovation network as the first port of call.

NAS also meet with 25 different organisations across the UK every 6 months to understand their support offers to innovators and ensure that referrals made through the service are accurate and well-informed. These organisations are integral to innovators being able to understand whether their innovation fits in the NHS and how to navigate a number of essentials steps including evidence generation, regulatory approval etc.

NAS continue to illustrate that remote working can be effective in delivering a national service, day to day especially when there is a shared mission of wanting to ensure patients and clinicians have access to new innovations to improve care. Following the strategy day NAS intend to meet with the wider NHS Innovation Service team to continue to explore how the service can reach wider audiences and flourish in its support to innovators and promoting economic growth.