Review of 2021: innovating and improving together

It’s been another eventful and challenging year for everyone working in health and care.

In our capacity as drivers of improvement and innovation, it’s been a joy and a privilege for all of us at the West of England AHSN to be able to play an important role in supporting our health and care colleagues across the region to tackle these challenges together.

From our work with industry and innovators to help them introduce new solutions and ways of working into the NHS through to sharing experiences and best practice across our three Integrated Care Systems to respond to the ongoing pressures from Covid-19, our collaborative, joined-up approach has never been more necessary or impactful.

In our Review of 2021, we look back at some of the highlights of our partnership working over the last 12 months.

We’d like to thank everyone involved (our academic, research, industry, health and care, and voluntary sector colleagues, our staff team and clinical leads, as well as many patient and public contributors) for the vital part you played in these achievements and we look forward to continuing to innovate with you in 2022.

Our core mission as an AHSN is to speed up the pipeline for innovations so that the benefits are available to patients and clinicians sooner.

An integral part of work is helping innovators to navigate the NHS,  understand the current gaps and needs, and get meaningful feedback on their idea, product or service. This year we’ve been thrilled to see a number of companies we’ve supported over the years achieve success. Here are their stories…

It’s been an exciting year for award recognition for the AHSN and our member and partner organisations.

PreciSSIon, our project to reduce surgical site infections after elective colorectal surgery, scooped a couple of national titles, while our support in the rollout of Covid Oximetry @home and virtual wards was recognised in the AHSN Network’s recent success at the HSJ Awards.

There was recognition too for PERIPrem, our perinatal care bundle developed in partnership with South West AHSN, which was highly commended at the HSJ Patient Safety Awards. Other work shortlisted included PReCePT (preventing cerebral palsy in preterm labour), the West of England Learning Disabilities Collaborative, and our series videos to support the training of carers to identify deterioration and communicate concern.

Due to the strength of our network and our joined-up, collaborative approach, we have been in an ideal position to continue playing a key role in supporting our health and care colleagues in different parts of the system to respond to the ongoing impact of the Covid pandemic.

In line with the NHS People Plan and the Long Term Plan, a key focus of our activity in the last year has been to work closely with our member and partner organisations to explore new ways of working and delivering care and how we better look after our people.

Our West of England Academy continues to deliver a range of informative, professional and
relevant education resources, help colleagues across our local healthcare systems and within our member organisations to think and work innovatively, and implement new ways of working using quality improvement (QI) methods and tools.

This year we have also recruited a new cohort of clinical leads, who support our projects and programmes with their expert clinical guidance. Clinical leads work with us on a part-time basis, whilst spending the majority of their working life in a clinical setting. This enables them to bring a level of insight that is often critical to the success of our work.

We are supporting NHS colleagues across the West to improve care for people with long-term conditions, such as cardiovascular disease (CVD) and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), as well as exploring ways to support people to more effectively self-manage their conditions.

Our commitment to the equality, diversity and inclusion agenda is a golden thread that needs to run through all our work programmes and manage our organisation.

This includes how we support our staff to be positive role models for equality and diversity, and this year we embarked on an enlightening programme of work with diversity consultants BCohCo to help our whole staff team grow in confidence.

We also want to better understand the impact of our work on all members of our communities and for our work to better reflect the needs of all the communities we serve in the West of England. Our work with Representation Matters and BCohCo to reduce inequity and improve maternity outcomes for Black women is an exciting example of this in action.

Our approach to exploring ways to support the health and care system to more effectively integrate and optimise care always has partnership-working and collaboration at its heart, as these latest success stories demonstrate.

We are working with NHS commissioners and providers, industry partners, other AHSNs, local trusts, child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) and community providers on a wide range of initiatives to support their work to improve mental healthcare and well-being. These are a couple of highlights from the last year…

Much of our work in the last year to improve the management of patients who are at risk of deterioration was refocused to support the Covid-19 response.

This included support to our three integrated care systems to rollout Covid Oximetry @home and virtual wards, making use of our existing expertise, infrastructure and resources. We also provided training for care home staff and introduced new technologies to help them identify people most at risk of deterioration and how to take appropriate action.