*** Please note the stakeholder survey is now closed. The findings are due to be published in late October 2016. Thank you to everyone that contributed their feedback. ***
Discussion, debate and collaboration are at the heart of all we do at the West of England AHSN, which is why we take our annual stakeholder survey very seriously.
Representing an important opportunity for our members and partners in the region to feed back their views on our work and impact, this year’s survey is now opens and we encourage you to share your opinions – positive and negative! It only takes around 10 minutes to complete and you’ll find it at www.yougov.com/weahsn. The survey closes on Monday 19 September.
As a network, we have achieved a great deal in the last year. If you haven’t already, take a look at our annual report to see some of our highlights.
In last year’s survey, the main areas our members wanted to see more focus on were: creating wealth; commercial development; and commissioning support. So what we have we been doing in those areas in the last 12 months?
Creating wealth
Our enterprise team has been working hard to connect companies with our healthcare communities to focus innovation on areas of health need and help drive economic growth. Last year we assisted 170 businesses and to date we have leveraged more than £10 million of new investment. We work closely with our Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEPs) and this year we jointly applied for over £3 million in European Structural Investment Funds to build new infrastructure and innovation networks for local businesses.
Commercial development
We have provided support for around 40 individuals to develop new healthcare enterprises. These are either NHS staff from our member organisations or companies who we have linked with clinicians for advice on how to improve their innovations. Our commercial development strategy relies heavily on our Link Director Network of senior decision makers within each member organisation, who are helping us deliver 20 new collaborative enterprise projects with the commercial sector. This includes our high profile test bed programme, enabling 12,000 people in the region with diabetes to better self-manage their condition using the latest digital tools. The test bed brings together over 10 companies and 10 health service organisations. Another key project is Design Together, Live Better, an online platform enabling collaboration between patients and companies to design the next generation of healthcare products based on patient needs.
Commissioning support
Our ‘Leadership Series’ is bringing together CCG leaders to collaborate on hot commissioning topics such as diabetes and musculo skeletal services. We’ve created evidence and evaluation online toolkits, developed the OpenPrescribing platform (now being picked up by other AHSNs) and we are supporting 11 GP Clinical Evidence Fellows.
For more on how we’ve responded to the feedback provided in last year’s survey, take a look at this ‘You said, we did’ article on our website.
We are proud of the work we’re achieving as an AHSN, but we also want to know where we can do more and better. We look forward to hearing your feedback through this year’s stakeholder survey and thanks in advance for taking the time to contribute.
Complete the online survey here. If you’d prefer to comment on the work of the AHSN Network as a whole, here is the national version of the survey.
Posted on August 17, 2016
