The Health Foundation’s Innovating for Improvement programme aims to improve health care delivery and/or the way people manage their own health care through the redesign of processes, practices and services.

We support clinical teams to develop their innovative ideas and approaches, put them into practice and gather evidence about how their innovation improves quality.

  • £1.5m available for up to 20 teams to test and develop innovative ideas and approaches to improve health care delivery and/or the way people manage their own health care in the UK.
  • Each project team will receive up to £75,000 of funding to support the implementation and measurement of the project.
  • Teams should demonstrate how their projects will lead to direct benefits or impact on patients.
  • In this round, we are also interested in applications that make use of data analysis.
  • Applications must be completed online by midday, Tuesday 28 March 2017

In this round of Innovating for Improvement we are also interested in applications from projects that will apply an innovative use of data.
Projects that will be considered under this theme could:

  • Use an innovative method of data analysis with existing health care data.
  • Use a novel data source (eg patient generated data) or data linkage.
  • Present existing data or analysis in an innovative way to improve care.
  • Use an existing data analysis technique to inform the development and testing of an innovative intervention.

The Innovating for Improvement programme is open to applicants from across the UK.

Teams need to demonstrate a clearly identified and convincing problem that they want to address, ie a significant quality issue that is relevant to UK health care.

Teams should demonstrate how their projects will lead to direct benefits or impact on patients within the programme timescale of 15 months, inclusive of a set-up phase of up to 3 months beginning in September 2017.

Projects must provide robust evidence to demonstrate that their idea is genuinely innovative and corresponds with one of the following four descriptions of innovation:

  • Descriptor 1: Innovations with no previous history in any context – they are genuinely new or novel
  • Descriptor 2: Innovations transferred into health care from another sector such as another public service body, another industry or non-health related field
  • Descriptor 3: Innovations transferred into the UK health care sector from health care systems overseas
  • Descriptor 4: Innovations transferred or adapted from one health care setting to another eg social care to health care

For more information please visit the Health Foundation’s website, here.