REVIEW OF
2021-22

This year we have continued to support our local health systems with delivery of the digital-first offer in the NHS Long Term Plan and have helped innovators to navigate the digital ecosystem. New technologies and models of digital care are emerging from a post-Covid landscape ripe for adoption.

We have focused on innovation and digital enabled care in care and community settings, providing evaluation and implementation support for NHS primary care organisations to improve patient health and experience, including teledermatology and digital self-management solutions. Our teams have helped the local Integrated Care Systems with strategic development, and contributed to the development and evaluation of an innovative new GP surgery providing exemplary facilities needed for the future of care.

“The NHS is a hotbed of innovation and technological revolution in clinical practice. Technology will play a central role in realising the Long Term Plan, helping clinicians use the full range of their skills, reducing bureaucracy, stimulating research and enabling service transformation. People will have more control over the care they receive and more support to manage their health, to keep themselves well and better manage their conditions, while assisting carers in their vital work.”

NHS Long Term Plan (2019)

We have continued to focus on opportunities to slow the onset and reduce the severity of frailty, through innovation and the spread of best practice.

Awareness of our healthy ageing programme has continued to build, and we’ve engaged with 20 organisations to support related innovations transforming care of older people.

Our frailty e-learning module has launched across all four UK nations, with our frailty fundamentals resources adopted for national spread by the NHS England Same Day Emergency Care team.

“With our ageing population it is increasingly important we improve awareness of frailty. The e-learning programme […] supports a wider understanding of frailty across health and care. It underpins much of the transformational work within the Ageing Well and NHS@Home programmes. The training is comprehensive and linked to the Frailty Core capabilities framework and is accessible to staff across both health and care, as well as the general public.”

Dr Adrian Hayter, National Clinical Director for Older People and Integrated Person Centred Care, NHS England

Our Nationally Prioritised Innovations programme has continued to roll out high impact innovations to achieve improvements in care and outcomes, via the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA) programme, and NHS England and NHS Improvement’s Accelerated Access Collaborative workstreams (the Rapid Uptake Products (RUP) programme, and the MedTech Funding Mandate).

During 2021-22, we delivered the three RUPs in the first year of the programme; Lipid Management, Measuring Fractional exhaled Nitric Oxide (FeNO) concentration to diagnose asthma, and Asthma Biologic therapies, and encouraged partners in Wessex to bid for AAC Pathway Transformation Funding.

As a result, more than 100,000 patients nationwide have benefited from FeNO testing and consequent improvements to the diagnosis and management of their severe and/or complex asthma. So far in Wessex, we’ve helped 8,033 people benefit and supported the adoption of 72 FeNO testing devices.

“I was in and out of hospital all the time, every couple of weeks and it was very frustrating because I know I’ve been told I have asthma, so to present at A&E and be told that it might not be asthma, that it might be something else; well, what else could it be? It was only after a visit to the severe asthma centre, the first thing they did was a FeNO test. I’m not a typical asthmatic so sometimes I’ll wheeze and sometimes I won’t. I don’t present as a typical asthmatic but after blowing into the FeNO machine I was diagnosed immediately with severe asthma and my path changed.”

Louise Reece Jones, patient participant volunteer

Over the last 12 months we’ve provided evaluation, real world validation and rapid insight approaches, to improve system capability and capacity for adoption and spread.

As part of the post-Covid system recovery we have expanded our Insight capacity and capability in response to increasing demand for our insights about successful innovation adoption.

During 2021-22, we supported 41 evaluation projects and reported 10 independent evaluations – available to browse in the Innovation Insight library.

We led the local evaluation of the Dorset Innovation Hub, attracting funding of £470,000 over 2.5 years.

Over 300 staff across the Wessex health and care system participated in rapid insight events in response to local need for insights into digital innovation and remote care.

We supported 8 primary care practices across HIOW ICS with the adoption and evaluation of 3 digital self-management innovations.

Our collaborative review to understand how AHSNs undertake spread and adoption has been published nationally by the AHSN Network to help AHSNs, and partners, understand and harness the AHSN collective experience and expertise.

“Since our formation in 2013, the AHSNs have amassed significant expertise in the approaches and challenges to adoption and spread of innovation. The review highlights a number of factors to consider and different types of approaches, which will be of use to those in local and national systems trying to spread innovation. [It] expands our knowledge base and will increase our capability to spread innovation in the NHS.”

Professor Gary Ford, Chair of the AHSN Network and Chief Executive of Oxford AHSN, speaking about Health Innovation Wessex’s review of spread and adoption approaches across the AHSN Network

Health and care systems and higher education institutions adapted to the challenges presented by Covid through strong system working and highly adaptive approaches across organisations, provider collaboratives, integrated care systems, and research structures. This year, we have significantly supported learning health and care systems and learning research and innovation ecosystems to improve discovery, sustain development and accelerate deployment through improvements to culture, processes and capabilities.

This year, around 1.6 million extra electronic repeat dispensing (eRD) prescription items were issued in Wessex, saving more than 6,800 GP hours.

We worked with the NHS Business Services Authority to create data dashboards to help GPs identify patients on regular medications who would benefit from electronic repeat dispensing.

Avoidable medication errors cost 1,700 lives and more than £98 million to the NHS in England every year. These mistakes could be caused during the prescribing, dispensing, administration of monitoring part of the process, and are recognised as a global issue. Across Wessex, 5,563 patients aged 85 or over were prescribed 10 or more medicines; for this age group, each additional medicine taken increases the risk of death by 3%. We’ve continued to prevent harm from inappropriate polypharmacy (multiple medications), developing a comparator tool enabling local systems and primary care to identify patients at risk and support better conversations with patients about medication issues.

“I just wanted to acknowledge all the hard work and effort that has gone into the development of the opioid prescribing comparators which were recently launched by NHSBSA. [They are] very impressive and provide some excellent insight. I am sure that when this insight is put into the right hands it will make a huge difference to improving patient safety and patient outcomes as well as potentially helping to save lives. This has been another excellent example of partnership working between Health Innovation Wessex and the NHSBSA to deliver a brilliant piece of work which will benefit the wider system and one which deserves to be celebrated.”

Michael Brodie CBE, Chief Executive, NHS Business Services Authority