Box 1.

Key NHS offerings that contribute to a culture supporting innovation

  • Best practice tariffs – incentivise and reimburse providers for the cost of high-quality, innovative care

  • Innovation Challenge Prizes – a national level celebration and reward for outstanding innovation in healthcare

  • Healthcare Small Business Research Initiative – pre-commercial procurement contracts for research and development in innovative healthcare products and services

  • Clinical excellence awards – rewarding clinicians for quality improvement, research and innovation

  • Academic Health Science Networks – 15 regional organisations bringing together healthcare, academia and industry on an open innovation platform to lead work in the NHS on adoption and diffusion of innovation

  • The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) – including the NICE Implementation Collaborative, Medical Innovation Briefings, Medical Technologies Evaluation Programme, NICE reviews and guidelines

  • NHS England Innovation portal – innovation connect and exchange provides support, advice and navigation through the system and is open to all who want to innovate and collaborate in healthcare

  • Innovation Scorecard – enables benchmarking and increases transparency for the variation of adoption in NICE technology appraisals

  • ‘Test beds’ – collaborations between the NHS and innovators that harness technology to address some of the most complex issues facing the health service. They provide real world sites testing combinatorial innovations that can deliver better care, better patient experience of care at the same or lower overall cost

  • National Innovation Accelerator – a fellowship programme equipping innovators with the skills knowledge and experience to drive the uptake of their proven innovations across the NHS.

  • Health and Social Care Innovation Expo

  • Healthy New Towns programme – improving health through the built environment, reshaping the health of communities and rethinking how health and care services can be delivered.

  • A Continuing Clinical Innovation (CCI) points scheme – this will become part of the continuing professional development scheme. A framework will be provided that allows clinicians and their appraisers to award CCI points for innovative activity that will count towards their annual appraisal and revalidation

  • The Innovation Technology Tariff – national level reimbursement for new medtech innovations4

  • The Clinical Entrepreneur Programme – a workforce development programme allowing clinicians to continue their frontline NHS roles while developing their entrepreneurial ideas