Innovation Manager at InnoScot Health, Fiona Schaefer looks at how best to inspire fresh innovation from a time-poor workforce

Successfully engaging an already pressured NHS workforce in fostering new ideas can be a challenging task but it’s one that all must be united in their commitment to achieving.

If done right, it’s also an exciting prospect with vast potential to shake up the health service and lay the foundations for an enduringly efficient and sustainable future.

Collectively making up a third of the country’s deeply skilled health and social care workforce, nurses, midwives, and allied health professionals (AHPs) are the vital backbone of the healthcare system with patients’ and families’ needs at the heart of everything they do.

These staff groups are therefore particularly well placed to use their knowledge to make a significant impact on ongoing aims to transform the NHS — whether improving patient care, enhancing working practices, or generating a financial return which benefits all.

When formal NHS Scotland partner InnoScot Health recently launched a fresh innovation push with the aim of inspiring nurses, midwives, and AHPs to come forward with innovative ideas, we did so knowing that the people we’re trying to reach represent a particularly busy section of the workforce.

They provide safe, effective, person-centred care and support across a variety of settings, routinely performing complex and skilled tasks while responding to a wide range of physical, clinical, and emotional needs.

This can mean anything from educating patients in helping them to understand their diagnoses and treatment and making difficult decisions on behalf of multi-disciplinary teams, to supervising and assessing junior staff, and helping to shape service development.

In other words, it can be a demanding job to say the least — but it can also be a very gratifying one when challenges are overcome and goals achieved, ultimately helping to make lives better.

We do, however, believe that the job satisfaction of pressured nurses, midwives, and allied health professionals (AHPs) can be improved through engagement in innovation — and that anyone can do it with the right passion, determination, and collaborative support.

The benefits for innovators alone are significant — recognition for being a forward-thinking asset to the workforce, empowerment from being part of a shared vision for improvement, and a sense of entrepreneurial achievement which could take your career to new places.

InnoScot Health aims to identify those with the right solutions and mindsets through engaging with individuals on a one-to-one basis while also understanding their personal circumstances which they may consider a blocker to realising their innovation aspirations.

Let’s be clear though — the biggest overall challenge for nurses, midwives, and AHPs is capacity.

Therefore, we need innovation that helps to make their jobs easier and more satisfying, aiding staff retention, while inspiring new people to join NHS Scotland.

We need fresh ideas that help staff to better manage the limited resources at their disposal, in turn producing greater efficiency and savings.

When there are patients in hospital with multiple conditions who want to be in their own home, then clearly a shift of focus from hospital to community care should be considered — but it must be a safe, carefully managed transition that offers many opportunities for innovation-driven solutions from those who best understand the practicalities.

Likewise, we have the ongoing shift from analogue to digital processes happening across the country, laying a platform for NHS standardisation while offering greater opportunities to leverage data. Innovation has a major role to play in harnessing opportunities to transition here to new and more effective pathways that can streamline staff processes and improve patient outcomes.

We know that community nurses are still finding that a lot of their time is spent on joining up care across the system.

Staff facing these sorts of challenges simply want time. Innovation targeted in the right areas could potentially give it back to them, bringing about improved wellbeing and protected learning time, amongst other benefits.

If successful, innovation can take on a life of its own; it gathers momentum. Staff talk to other staff and their advocacy is powerful when they believe in an innovation. You might be the nurse, midwife, or AHP to inspire that momentum with your game-changing idea.

InnoScot Health repeatedly finds that NHS staff underestimate the value of their own knowledge and insights.

This couldn’t be further from the truth. Nurses, midwives, and AHPs offer vast experience which can be leveraged by InnoScot Health to take a simple spark of inspiration to the next level with our support and 23 years of collaborative know-how in turning ideas into reality.

We recognise that busy staff can’t make innovations happen on their own — there simply isn’t enough time in the day – so we help to take the strain and lighten the load.

To get started, all they have to do is complete a short and simple online form. It is the first, most important step in the process of developing an idea into a new innovation that could improve outcomes for patients, potentially also making working practices faster and easier.

Ideas that meet InnoScot Health’s criteria for support will be given help to develop their innovation, including guidance to source funding for its development, regulatory support, project management, and extensive innovation expertise.

One of the best examples of our success in helping to turn concept into commercial success has been the Patient Transfer Scale (PTS) which saw us working closely with Gillian Taylor, an Emergency Department Nurse at NHS Lanarkshire.

The Marsden PTS — which won the Queens Award for Enterprise in Innovation — is designed to address the needs of patients admitted to hospital who are either too sick to stand on scales or are immobile, with an accurate patient weight being critical for medication dosage.

The scale combines a standard patient transfer board with a class III approved weighing scale, enabling medication to be administered quickly and its deployment in hospital settings around the world.

We passionately believe that nurses, midwives, and AHPs can become agents of change but it’s essential to first engage with their challenges if we are to support a better healthcare tomorrow.