In 2022, the Trust was chosen to be one of 10 national test and evaluation sites for the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme – known as “Clinical Insites”.
Innovation at Bradford Teaching Hospitals
About innovation at BTHFT
Our fellow Clinical Insite partners are:
- Chelsea & Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
- Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust
- Mid & South Essex NHS Foundation Trust
- Torbay & South Devon NHS Foundation Trust
- Birmingham Women’s & Children’s NHS Foundation Trust
- Northumbria Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust
- Newcastle Upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- East of England Ambulance Service NHS Trust
- Milton Keynes University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
As a Clinical Insite, we can review a range of innovations choosing to be involved with those clinical entrepreneurs and innovations that we think will most benefit our patients.
However, we also want to use our membership of the programme to help us create a framework to help our people here at the Trust generate and develop their own innovative ideas.
Our role as a test and evaluation site
Nationally we are seeing clinical entrepreneurs with ideas that are mature and ready for testing and scaling. It is fantastic that our Trust is able to be a founding partner, providing a test bed for solutions that benefit our patients.
Throughout the last 9 months we have reviewed over 50 innovations that are currently part of the programme and have agreed to explore testing and evaluating 7 of those. These are:
Rehab My Patient
This is an app that allows Physiotherapists to prescribe exercises to their patients. The patient can then use the app to remind them how to perform the prescribed exercise and record progress made.
This app is used by our therapies team at BTHFT who have worked with the Trust Quality team to identify meaningful outcome criteria against which to measure its use. Feedback from the Therapies team is very good.
More information on this innovation can be found at rehabmypatient.com.
Rehab Me
This app is designed by the same entrepreneur that created Rehab my patient and is intended for use by patients whilst they wait for their first appointment with Physiotherapy. We intend for our first contact practitioners (FCPs) to use it in primary care and community settings.
More information on this innovation can be found at rehabme.com.
Generation Medics
This innovation is unusual in that it is not an app or a device but a platform and outreach service to provide information, advice and coaching support to young people and the unemployed, encouraging and helping them to consider and pursue careers in healthcare.
The Trust and our partners in the City of Bradford Metropolitan District Council are working together with Generation Medics across the district to target young people in underprivileged communities and help them get on track towards rewarding careers in the health and care sectors.
More information on Generation Medics can be found at generationmedics.org.uk.
Ufonia
This innovation is a system that can replace routine patient healthcare interactions with next generation automated phone calls allowing patient information to be gathered and forwarded to clinical teams.
It is thought that it may work well as the front end of patient-led queries/PIFU and that it would be useful in collecting data such as PROMS scores. Its use is being explored in relation to lower limb orthopaedic activity at the Trust.
More information on Ufonia can be found at ufonia.com.
Safira
This innovation is a new technology for regional anaesthesia. Regional anaesthesia procedures generally require two operators – an anaesthetist holding an ultrasound scanner to guide needle tip placement and a second operator to inject the anaesthetic solution at a required pressure. If the anaesthetic solution is injected at a pressure that is too high, it can potentially cause nerve damage. Safira is a device that allows a single operator (an anaesthetist or anaesthesiologist) to conduct the whole regional block at safer pressures. It has been taken through the entire development pathway, from regulatory approval to market launch and since 2021 has been available in Europe and the USA.
The device has been demonstrated at the Trust and small pilot, using the device at the Trust is underway.
More information on Safira can be found at medovate.co.uk.
LinkMedics
Like Generation Medics, this innovation is unusual in that it is not an app or a device but is a digital platform that connects doctors who are British citizens but who have recently completed their medical training overseas with training and employment opportunities in the NHS. The Trust is working with LinkMedics to employ in the region of 8 FY1 junior doctors via this route.
More information on LinkMedics can be found at thelinkmedics.com.
Developing our own innovations at BTHFT
As well as testing and evaluating innovations from outside the Trust we’re also keen to start developing our own innovative ideas at the Trust and we want to help all staff do this.
Some of the other 9 Clinical Insite Trusts have very advanced systems and processes for developing innovations, testing them and taking them to market.
We have learned from these Trusts and over the next few months we hope to develop our own support framework for entrepreneurs here at the trust.
As a first step we will run a series of events to gather a range of problem statements and details of unmet needs across the Trust. Sharing these both internally at the Trust and with external partners such as the University of Bradford Digital Health Enterprise Zone and Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust to generate ideas and find solutions.
We will run similar events, probably on a quarterly basis, that will call for innovative ideas from our staff from all across the Trust and ask for short “elevator pitches” with a view to accepting some innovative ideas into our development support framework.
A key part of this framework will be our “innovation passport”. The “innovation passport” is a collection of documents, advice and guidance that our Service and Business Development team will go through with you when you are looking to develop your innovative idea. They range from a simple initial evaluation tool to assess the potential of an innovation through to assistance to help you with the pilot, proof of concept and safety testing stages of innovation development and eventually right through to creating a final product.
As mentioned already, Leeds Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust is a fellow Clinical Insite Trust and already has well established arrangements to generate and develop clinical innovation. We have fostered a strong relationship with Leeds and as part of this BTHFT innovators are invited to the Leeds monthly innovation club meetings where new innovations are showcased and network connections made.
