Health Innovation and Co-Creation Research Group

Organisations involved:

Lead:

• Brainport Development Netherlands

Collaborating:

• Mersey Care NHS Trust
• City of Eindhoven
• Technische Universiteit Eindhoven
• Alexianer Forschungszentrum Krefeld
• Geestelijke Gezondheidszorg Eindhoven
• Thomas Moore Hogeschool
• Expertisecentrum dementie Vlaanderen
• Nursing Home Sint-Augustine

Project overview

The innovate dementia project was a three year European 5.4 million euro funded project (Interreg IVB) which started on the 1st April 2012 and completed at the end of September 2015. LJMU worked with a local mental health trust, Merseycare NHS Trust, as a UK partnership in collaboration with European partners from the Netherlands, Belgium and Germany, to explore ways of developing innovative approaches to dementia care. This approach is based upon the concern that dementia is a significant European and global issue with dementia cases expected to rise significantly in North West Europe by 2025. The Innovate Dementia project aimed to address these concerns by placing people living with dementia at the centre of the research-to-innovation process. The project also intended to raise awareness around the use of innovative and technological-based care models which included supporting the move towards community-based dementia care.

HELIUM Health Innovation Experimental Landscape through Policy Improvement Policy Improvement) (2016 – 2020

Aimed to address market failures and exploit opportunities for economic growth in the health, social care and innovation sector. Liverpool City Region’s SME’s were supported across the innovation cycle to develop and commercialise innovative products and services within sub-sectors where the city is a market leader and has a smart specialisation strategy, benefitting businesses whilst generating financial gains for the health and care sector.

Both projects were delivered in tandem and focussed on public engagement in the health and wellbeing sector through a citizen-led approach to innovation. The public engaged through a series of open innovation events and corresponding ‘co-creation’ groups, concentrated on solving health challenges. Through a SWOT process, the following health challenges were identified:

• Funding/commission elements not sufficiently strong
• Links between sectors (e.g. health and digital, health and energy) not strong enough
• Insufficient data underpinning smart specialisation
• Inconsistent engagement of public sector care and health and industry across Liverpool City Region
• Unaligned business support activity

Find out more by visiting the HELIUM website

Aimed to address market failures and exploit opportunities for economic growth in the health, social care and innovation sector. Liverpool City Region’s SME’s were supported across the innovation cycle to develop and commercialise innovative products and services within sub-sectors where the city is a market leader and has a smart specialisation strategy, benefitting businesses whilst generating financial gains for the health and care sector.

Both projects were delivered in tandem and focussed on public engagement in the health and wellbeing sector through a citizen-led approach to innovation. The public engaged through a series of open innovation events and corresponding ‘co-creation’ groups, concentrated on solving health challenges. Through a SWOT process, the following health challenges were identified:

• Funding/commission elements not sufficiently strong
• Links between sectors (e.g. health and digital, health and energy) not strong enough
• Insufficient data underpinning smart specialisation
• Inconsistent engagement of public sector care and health and industry across Liverpool City Region
• Unaligned business support activity

Innovation can also bring financial benefits and economic growth if implemented and translated into successful business models to meet the complex needs of the care system. The failure of innovative ideas is often due to innovative systems not facilitating the scouting, creation, valorisation and market uptake of the innovation. Helium intended to change this with its twin objective of boosting the development of health innovation and economic growth through sharing knowledge, ensuring more opportunities are created to implement new technology in health.

This programme supported local businesses, with innovative solutions, to access the health and care markets. By providing bespoke, one-to-one assistance, we aided businesses hone their products and services. Through real-world validation, we demonstrated their practical and commercial benefits.

Rafaela’s offers top tips to SME’s on providing real-world validation

Find out more by visiting the Health Matters website

Children and young people’s (CYP) mental health service referrals were paper-based at Liverpool and Sefton Clinical Commissioning Groups. These types of paper-based referrals have been deemed inefficient and can lead to slow referrals, delays in appointment times, all having further negative effects on children and young people’s mental health.

With support from Alder Hey Children’s NSH Trust, we helped to co-create a web-based platform where children and young people could easily and quickly make referrals and book appointments. It was hypothesised that this new web-based platform would alleviate the previously mentioned issues with paper-based referrals.

Through a co-design phase, we were able to include resources on the platform that children, young people and their families believed to be beneficial when looking to make referrals and/or booking appointments. This phase also enabled a change in the referral system structure, making it more friendly and accessible for children, young people and families. The platform can be viewed here: http://www.seftonliverpoolcamhs.co.uk/.

This project enabled us to create a new, ongoing project titled “Invention for Innovation (i4i) Programme – CYP as One – Investigation in how to further support the community through digital innovation” in which we are currently comparing the paper-based referral system to the web-based, hoping to uncover which method is more efficient in aiding mental health referrals, and also how to further improve the referral system in the future.

The i4i project is currently underway and is a continuation of the CYP as one project where we are evaluating whether the original paper-based method of mental health referral or the new web-based platform is more efficient in aiding the referral process. Through this project, we are also hoping to address the challenges and issues children, young people and parents face during mental health referral and will use these issues to further improve the referral system in the future.

To compete this project, we will be implementing three rounds of focus groups with young people (aged 16-19), parents of under 16s and professionals who work alongside children and young people. Our research team will also be using quantitative data from the web-based platform itself.