Embracing Innovation: ‘Thinking Differently’ with our postgraduate clinical workforce

Today I will be supporting the national Health Innovation Network in a joint event with the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges, titled ‘Thinking Differently’. This event will build upon our shared mission to increase the understanding and excitement of front-line NHS Staff and senior leadership in innovation.

The last time I was involved in a joint gathering with the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges was last January, when I was clinically leading the NHS Digital Academy. That proved to be a key moment in gathering momentum for building digital skills in our workforce. In my current role, I know the exam question is much wider – when transforming lives through innovation, the mindset towards change, as well as the empowerment to drive it, is key.

Today provides the opportunity to engage with clinicians and leaders as well as showcase the best of innovation across the country. My colleague, Chris Laing, CEO of UCL partners, will open the day, setting the scene to highlight the broad challenges we are working to solve. Across the day we will hear from Professor Nicola Ranger, General Secretary and Chief Executive of the Royal College of Nursing, and Dr Jeanette Dickson, Chair of the Academy of Medical Royal Colleges.

The conversation will inform outcomes and policy, so in this blog, I wanted to explore how we can immediately drive change and engagement with our professional workforce to enable grassroots impactful innovation.

Creating opportunity

I have launched two national fellowship programmes in my career. The Topol Digital Fellowship and the NHS Fellowships in Clinical AI. These initiatives are fantastic, but often a drop in the ocean. We need more of these opportunities to enable change-agent creation. At Health Innovation KSS, we run local fellowship programmes across digital innovation and population health. Last week I delivered the final session with our University Hospital Sussex Digital Innovation Fellows and took the opportunity with them to celebrate their journey and look back on their experience. Going forward we are also thinking about how we support learners undertaking the Flexible Training Portfolio in our region to engage with innovation opportunities.

Boosting clinical intrapreneurship

Paul Corrigan, CBE, who is advising the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, recently called for the NHS needing more entrepreneurs. As part of todays’ event, we will see several entrepreneurs present their work. However, not everyone wants to commercialise their ideas and so we also need to empower the voice of frontline clinicians and allow them to be intrapreneurs. I fortunately have had platforms which allow me to play the intrapreneur role, as well as formal training by joining initiatives like the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme. We will need more role modelling of this across the NHS.

Working with industry

Culture and openness to the private sector is important to the success of innovation. It allows for a different way of thinking, different language and understanding of change levers. Whether it’s life sciences, technology or venture capital, there are new skills to gain. We want to retain our clinical workforce but at a time, where the next generation are looking for less linear careers and instead a range of experiences, enabling clinician involvement in collaboration with industry partners could be impactful. This was a recommendation we have included in the Training the Future GP Report, given the number of innovations and technologies GPs interact with, commission as partners, and lead practice transformation with.

I appreciate not all of this will be popular or for everyone, but The Innovation Ecosystem Programme review led by Roland Sinker, CBE, was clear on the need to work with industry as well as the need to boost skills in clinical innovation. For medics, we have an opportune moment to leverage the recently launched review into postgraduate medical training to ‘think differently’ about our future workforce and the opportunities they could have, and I hope today’s event will make strides in this direction.