Innovation at the heart of the three shifts in the 10-year plan for the NHS (hospital to community, analogue to digital, treatment to prevention) and an essential part of the improvement journey.
For innovation to thrive, it needs a fertile culture that can nourish and support it. The HIOW Innovation Forum is an opportunity to create this culture through collaboration and identification of solutions. It forms part of the wider Enabling Innovation workstream, which aims to connect, support, and empower the local workforce to create the conditions and culture for successful implementation, adoption, and scaling of innovations.
The Forum is co-designed with our steering group, which is made up of strategic leads from local trusts and the ICB. Through taking this collaborative approach, we fully embody the ethos of the Forum while ensuring that the events continue to align to system needs and priorities. The Innovation Adoption Team are also working with our Industry and Innovation colleagues to surface relevant innovators to showcase their solutions at events to provide colleagues with tools to tackle their biggest challenges.
Four Innovation Forum events are planned for 2025-26, the first of which centred ‘Inspiring Innovation’ and setting the scene for the work. The following three events will focus on system challenges and needs highlighted by attendees and our steering group.
To facilitate cross-organisation working and connections, we have created an NHS Futures page to highlight innovation opportunities and enable local colleagues to network, collaborate, and share learning between events.
