News

Here is the latest blog from our Chief Operating Officer, Richard Stubbs

Recently we published our Annual Report for 2018. This gave me a great opportunity to reflect both on our impact to date and on how we will continue to work in the future.

This has been a landmark year for the AHSN as, together with the other 14 AHSNs that make up the national Network, we reached the end of our first licence period.

In recognition of this, we’ve highlighted some of our achievements from our first five years and also started to set out how we aim to continue to work with our local and national partners in the future. Please do take a look at the report online to see examples of our work.

We are particularly proud of examples that originated in Yorkshire and Humber and which are now going on to have national impact, such as:

• Our region is saving £2.5 million every year as a result of the ‘Faecal Calprotectin Pathway programme’ that we helped to develop and spread and has led to revisions in NICE guidance
• 1 million older people have now been assessed for severe or moderate frailty following the national implementation of Yorkshire’s ‘electronic Frailty Index’
• 129 CCGs across the country now use the ‘Physical Health Review’ template that we developed to assess and identify health risks in people with serious mental illnesses

These successes could never have been achieved without the close collaboration of our regional partners. As an AHSN we continue to work with the Integrated Care Systems and Sustainability and Transformation Partnership in our region, and we also work at place and individual organisation level whenever appropriate.

As you will no doubt be aware, NHS England has now re-licensed all 15 AHSNs for at least the next five years. This firmly establishes the AHSN Network as the innovation arm of the NHS. On behalf of our national commissioners at NHS England, NHS Improvement and the Office for Life Sciences we act as a bridge between healthcare providers, commissioners, academia and industry. We continue to connect these sectors, building a pipeline of solutions from research and product development and taking these innovations through to adoption and spread at scale.

If you have any questions or would like further information or a conversation about our Annual Report for 2018 please do get in touch.