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Research and Innovation

We are committed to our population living happier and healthier lives. Research is one way that we can make this happen by providing the evidence to improve treatments and care. This could be by testing new medicines or vaccines or by completing questionnaires to help us understand how people feel about the care they receive.

Benefits to taking part in research can include learning more about your health or receiving closer monitoring. Taking part in a project may not always help you directly, but you will be helping to improve services and treatments now and in the future.

Where does research take place?

In Norfolk and Suffolk research takes place across many health and care settings including GP surgeries, hospitals and in schools, prisons, care homes and other settings.

How can I get involved?

You might be invited to take part in research via your GP practice or local NHS Trust. More information about what it is like to take part in research and different ways to get involved can be found via the Be Part of Research national website and our local research in primary care website.

You can also take part by sharing your experiences to help identify research questions or shape the design of research projects, this is known as Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE). Locally, the University of East Anglia’s Citizens Academy provides opportunities and training for PPIE in research at the university.

Research takes place across the NHS in Norfolk and Suffolk, more information can be found on the dedicated research webpages:

Innovation

Innovation is central to addressing the challenges facing our health and care system. Innovation is a broad term, and to us, means new ways of doing things which could be a new technology or treatment, a new service or an existing service in a new setting. Norfolk and Suffolk Integrated Care Board (ICB) has a statutory duty to promote innovation in the provision of health and care services.

We know that innovation can improve healthcare and can lead to services being more cost-effective.

Innovation is a cross-cutting theme within our ICB and across our Integrated Care System (ICS) and is integral to everything we do. We work to ensure the opportunities for receiving innovative services are equitable across the ICS and we aim to support the adoption, evaluation and spread of innovations.

More about innovation at our ICB

We are focussed on embedding a culture of innovation across the ICB and wider ICS. We support the system to have an integrated innovation culture based on learning from, and sharing with, each other across the system.

We support ICB/ICS teams to identify innovation needs and work with partners such as Health Innovation East, NHS InSites, National Innovation Accelerator and Clinical Entrepreneur programmes to scope and match innovations that are of value and support the needs of our local population.

We work with teams to support them to implement, evaluate, adopt and spread innovations that meet the needs of our local population.

Developing and nurturing an integrated innovation culture across a system is an evolving process and establishing a culture that values adaptability and continuous learning is essential for systemic innovation. We use a multi-level approach across the system to grow innovation capacity, this includes a system-wide vision for innovation, sharing of innovation across teams and providers, upskilling staff across all levels, and working with external organisations to help us grow an innovation culture. 

We host and facilitate an innovation network and provide learning opportunities across our system to support collaboration and sharing of innovation needs, solutions and projects across teams. The aim of this network is to accelerate the use of innovation across our system through partnership working.

Collaborations with tech companies, universities, and the voluntary sector allow us to enhance access to new technologies, funding, and expertise. These partnerships support a culture of co-design, bringing diverse perspectives into the innovation process and enriching the solutions developed in Norfolk and Suffolk.

Identifying innovation needs, matching them to suitable innovations that are safe and impactful to our local population and then implementing these, can be a complex process. We work with teams to help them identify innovation needs and then work with partners and innovators to match innovations to the identified needs.