Making a difference to the health and wellbeing of the West Midlands

The UHUK Innovation Programme

The UHUK Innovation Programme is a first of a kind partnership with University of Warwick West Midlands Health and Wellbeing Innovation Network to deliver innovation in urgent health. 

The programme convenes innovators with urgent health challenge solutions to co-create products and services rapidly with UHUK members. 

Our Demo Day, held on August 9th 2023, featured innovative solutions that were co-created with UHUK members to transform the urgent health landscape. Cohort one’s solutions to three pre-defined challenge areas culminated in presentations and discussions on how they would be taken forward. 

Here’s how the day played out…

Read about the day below:

Conor Burke: Today’s demo day just brings together six months of really hard work between the Urgent Health UK members and the innovators and solution providers that have co-created together new, exciting, dynamic solutions that are going to really help us deliver better care to patients, deliver more optimal services through our workforce, and to really have a greater impact on our communities.

David Brown: A day like today has really given a confidence that these technologies are out there, and therefore working as part of a UHUK challenge program, we were able to combine those and implement them as part of an end-to-end workflow. There is a real will to see innovation and to challenge the current norms and also a collaborative network of suppliers, vendors, members of UHUK and also the wider systems – to come together to see how those capabilities could probably, or potentially support the optimisation of our workforce and also therefore the experience of patients and our people.

Amanda Sparkes: Being a nurse and having nursed for significant period of time now, 25 year, within the NHS – being able to step out and deliver something back, that’s adding value, not just within my one organisation I’m working for, but that speaks to a number of organisations, a number of problems, not even just in isolation in the UK, but offshore as well. I think it’s really powerful and being able to speak from a place of: I’ve been in those shoes, I still wear those shoes and I’m delivering that care.

What I’d like to see, what I really hope for and what I could be helpful in spearheading now, is being able to break down those walls between NHS healthcare providers and private enterprise. When you start working together what can be built together is just phenomenal and I think if I could just see more of that and more of what the UHUK have been able to do with this collaboration, being done elsewhere, that would be amazing.

Simon Abrams: Getting clinicians, people who manage healthcare organisations and entrepreneurs all together, all working together – you can really get the solutions that you need to the problems that we face in the health service. What’s really struck me today is how it’s been a whole team piece of work. It’s not been the health service plus business – it’s been about a team of people all with different skills coming together, teasing out the problem, working out the solutions. I’ve just enjoyed it enormously.