Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention
The Government has reaffirmed the need to place quality of care at the heart of the NHS and the Quality, Innovation, Productivity and Prevention (QIPP) programme is all about ensuring that each pound spent is used to bring maximum benefit and quality of care to patients.
The NHS needs to achieve up to £20 billion of efficiency savings by 2015. Design is a process which delivers innovation and it can help you achieve cost savings in A&E delivery.
Why innovate?
- Innovation in the NHS is about making a real and tangible improvement to the patient experience. Great ideas have improved safety in hospital for staff and patients, they have made the patient journey clearer and they've helped staff work more productively.
- Innovation connects and drives quality and productivity in the NHS. With increasing financial pressures and continually increasing demand for improved quality of services it is clear that the NHS must raise its game to develop more high-quality and cost-effective interventions if it is to keep improving.
- Innovation supports the UK economy. Innovation is not just about the future of health care. The NHS is a major investor and wealth creator in the UK, and by investing in UK design, technology and science it can deliver a better patient experience and support staff to do their job as well as supporting UK businesses by procuring innovative products and services from them.
Why design?
The challenge for the NHS is to achieve the systematic adoption and diffusion of innovation at pace and scale. It is therefore crucial that best practice, innovative ways of working and new technologies are not only identified and adopted locally but are shared and spread across the NHS.
- Design is a people-centred discipline that can help you understand what changes need to be made by focusing on what people (staff and patients) need.
- Design is a collaborative process that engages NHS staff, from the frontline as well as from management, to lead and support change.
- Designers are connectors and will establish multi-disciplinary teams including researchers, technologists, organisational and psychological consultants to respond to an issue and enable solutions to be adopted.
- Design generates new ideas that create new markets and business opportunities.
Watch this short video of designers and business people discussing designs role in delivering innovation. It includes a short case study of the Aravind Eye Hospital in India, which designed an innovative new cataract surgery service by redesigning it's whole operational process.