Welcome to Health Lab

Health Lab is a new initiative from Nesta that brings together our practical work on health and ageing to achieve more impact. We want to build on our work on people powered health over the past six years and take it further.

Our people powered health work started from an interest in the relationship between citizens and professionals. We argued that this relationship needs to change – from a passive user being 'done to' by a professional, to a partnership focused on what is important to the individual, in which each has relevant knowledge to bring.

Nowhere is this more important than in health and ageing. People powered health captures some core principles of how we should create health:

• People: citizens living well with health conditions in their everyday life and working together as partners with professionals.
• Powered: not a zero-sum power shift, but a motivated workforce working with citizens to give them more control over their own health.
• Health: recognising the social, as well as clinical, dimensions of health and wellbeing.

Over the past six years we have worked on this agenda with key players across the health, care, voluntary, community and social enterprise sectors. We have supported new practice on the ground and have influenced policy. We have helped convene a national alliance to achieve people powered health at scale. We are also developing a pioneering approach to transforming complex systems in health and care.

But we want to achieve more. Health Lab reflects Nesta's long-term commitment to improving people's health and wellbeing, in the context of an ageing population. Our focus will be on using social and digital innovations to significantly improve health and ageing. We will work with a wide range of partners to further develop, support and scale innovations, to help create health and care that is for people, by people and with people.

We are always looking to work with others. If you are interested in finding out more about us and how to get involved, we would love to hear from you.

Halima Khan, Executive Director Health Lab

Our vision

We want to create a people powered health system.

There have been lots of attempts to solve the challenges facing the health system, but these have focused heavily on top-down structural change and new drugs. These solutions are familiar, but they are inadequate. The challenges now facing the health system require a different response.

We believe the answer lies in a health system for people, by people and with people. This means providing healthcare for people when they need it, enabling people to manage their health in everyday life, and connecting people into networks that help them support one another.

This approach to health and ageing will require new relationships, networks and knowledge powered by digital technologies.

How we work

Health Lab is about creating real change to improve people's health.

We know complex problems can't be solved by just talking. To make change happen we need to roll up our sleeves and work with others to test and scale new ways of doing things.

We do this by backing new solutions that put people powered health into practice. We use a unique mix of funding, research, networks and experiments to achieve these results.

We value our relationships and seek partners who share a commitment to a health system for people, by people and with people.

We make change happen at the frontline and we also influence national policy. Our work is informed by the best solutions from around the world.

Our story

Nesta's Health Lab designs and runs practical programmes that work directly with innovators. These programmes create new and better ways of improving health on the ground. Nesta is also an investor through our impact investment fund, and we lead research on health innovation and run challenge prizes, including the Longitude Prize on antibiotic resistance.

The work of Health Lab has three main areas of focus:

• Social health - engaging patients and the broader community in actively creating health.
• Digital health - learning from new sources of data to make health and care more precise and effective.
• System change - enabling local health and care economies to transform at pace through 100-day People Powered Results sprints.

Social health

In 2013, Nesta published People Powered Health: Health for people, by people and with people. The report set out a vision for a health system focused on people and the families, communities and networks that they are part of. It brought together practice and evidence for collaborative consultations and ‘more than medicine’ support, such as peer networks. The report was the result of an 18 month innovation programme working with six frontline teams across England, led by Nesta, in partnership with the Innovation Unit.

People Powered Health has influenced policy and provided the catalyst for an alliance at the national level - the Coalition for Collaborative Care. The work has also led to new partnerships that further support and scale practice on the ground. We have worked with the Cabinet Office to support the development and scaling of innovations including peer networks, and new models of care such as Shared Lives Plus, a family-based care model. Through the Helping in Hospitals programmes, volunteers have been trained to support patients in ten hospitals to make an immediate difference to their experience.

We continue to develop the field of social health, including through the Realising the Value programme, which aims to help make the health and care system more centred around people and communities.

Digital health

We believe that digital technology is one of a small number of genuine opportunities to sustain the health and care system. By giving a more detailed picture of the everyday experience of people with health conditions, we can learn to target care much more effectively: earlier, via predictive analytics; and in a way that is more tailored to individual need, via a more precise understanding of disease and treatment. Digital health can also support people to care for themselves by creating effective tools for behaviour change and self care.

To build this understanding of how to better target care, and support people to care for themselves, we need a new approach to research and learning. This requires communities of people who use digital technology to manage their health and who are happy to record data and share it with researchers in a way that allows research conclusions to be drawn. This requires innovation in terms of interfaces, consent processes, data models and analytics.

Through the Centre for Social Action we are supporting digital apps, such as uMotif, that enable people to generate data that helps them manage their health. We are also developing new apps to support people affected by Dementia through the Dementia Citizens programme.

System change

We know that individual innovations are not sufficient to change the health and care system at the scale or pace required. We are therefore working with the Rapid Results Institute to trial 100-day sprints to stimulate innovation and collaboration across health, care and the voluntary sector. People closest to the action are empowered to test out new ways of working, giving them the opportunity to work across professional boundaries to solve the problems that matter for their communities.

Empowering the front line brings insight into the real issues and challenges in achieving long term strategic aims. It enables much closer working with citizens to create person-centred care and helps to create momentum and energy for change from the bottom-up. This front-line work is backed up by strong leadership and support from political and executive leaders, to give permission to innovate and help the teams unblock log jams. The work has started in Essex and early results are promising, with an energised workforce, increased collaboration and impact on key metrics such as unnecessary hospital admissions.

Next steps

The principles of People Powered Health have become more recognised over the last two years. The Five Year Forward View describes people as a ‘renewable resource' and sets out a strategic vision which aligns closely with People Powered Health. This change is part of an emerging consensus across health and care. Nesta has worked with partners to contribute to this shift and we will continue to look to the future to progress social health, digital health and system change. We will also work with others to identify new trends that have the potential to significantly improve health and ageing.

Key reports

The document provides a visual timeline of key reports from 2009 to 2015. These include:

• 2009: The Human Factor
• 2010: Right Here, Right Now
• 2011-2012: People Powered Health
• 2013: People Powered Health: Health for people, by people and with people; Doctor Know; The Business Case for People Powered Health
• 2013-2014: 5ive Hours A Day; Centre for Social Action Innovation Fund
• 2014: Which Doctors Take Up Promising Ideas?
• 2015: The NHS in 2030; Refilling the Innovator's Prescription; People Helping People

Current work

People Powered Results

Nesta and the Rapid Results Institute are pioneering a new approach to transforming complex systems. We are working with frontline health and care professionals to achieve meaningful change in 100 days. Frontline professionals are challenged to find innovative ways to improve care. Big problems are broken down into specific, achievable objectives and detailed approaches are developed and tested in real time with real people on a rapid iterative basis. Teams are supported to take on new behaviours that enable greater collaboration and problem-solving. The result is a measurable impact on a key metric and an energised system working together.

Realising the Value

Realising the Value is a programme to help make the health and care system more centred around people and communities. It is doing this by identifying evidence-based approaches that engage people and communities in their own health and care, and by developing tools to support implementation on the ground. The programme will also make recommendations on behavioural, cultural and systemic changes needed to achieve a shift to person and community-centred care.

www.realisingthevalue.org.uk

Coalition for Collaborative Care

Nesta is one of the founding members of the Coalition for Collaborative Care, a growing alliance of people and organisations committed to making person-centred and collaborative care the norm. The Coalition works at a national and local level with professional champions, people with long-term conditions, experts and leaders, to demonstrate how person-centred care can be achieved. Coalition partners include people with long-term conditions and organisations from across the health, social care and voluntary sectors. The coalition has tripled its number of members recently and currently has more than 40 member organisations.

Helping in Hospitals

The Helping in Hospitals programme was inspired by King's College Hospital and its high-impact volunteering workforce. The programme aims to adapt and test these methods with other hospitals. In August 2014, Nesta partnered with the Cabinet Office to support six hospitals to significantly expand the reach and impact of their hospital volunteering service, and to share evidence of the impact on patients and their families. In February 2015 Nesta partnered with The Department of Health to work with four further hospitals to focus specifically on volunteering roles for young people aged 16-24 years. Both these programmes will be reporting in Spring 2016.

Centre for Social Action Innovation Fund

The Centre for Social Action Innovation Fund is a £14m fund to support the growth of innovations that mobilise people's energy and talents to help each other, working alongside public services. The Fund is a partnership between Nesta and the Cabinet Office. We are supporting 17 grantees with a specific focus on health and ageing, including digital innovations to make better use of health data, national charities scaling new approaches to peer support, and a social impact bond focused on reducing loneliness amongst older people.

Dementia Citizens

Dementia Citizens is a platform which will allow people living with dementia and researchers to connect digitally. The platform will recruit people affected by dementia and communicate with them about the range of research they could get involved in, making it easy for them to give informed consent. The platform will host research projects that participants find easy to use and which produce rigorous research conclusions. Dementia Citizens will ensure citizen participation in the direction and conduct of research by building community ownership with those affected by dementia.

Accelerating Ideas

The Accelerating Ideas pilot scheme is focused on improving the lives of older people through increasing resilience, reducing isolation, and improving the engagement and influence of older people in the UK. Accelerating Ideas is aimed at supporting innovations that have been tested and which have the potential to deliver greater impact.

As part of this, the Big Lottery Fund and Nesta are working in partnership over the next five years to provide financial and practical support to help a portfolio of promising social innovations to further increase their reach and impact.

We know that the best ideas often come from unexpected places and we are always looking to work with others. If you're interested in finding out more about us and how to get involved, you can visit:

www.nesta.org.uk/areas-work/health-and-ageing or email [email protected]

About Nesta

Nesta is an innovation charity with a mission to help people and organisations bring great ideas to life. We are dedicated to supporting ideas that can help improve all our lives, with activities ranging from early-stage investment to in-depth research and practical programmes.

Contact Us:

1 Plough Place London EC4A 1DE

[email protected] @nesta_uk www.facebook.com/nesta.uk www.nesta.org.uk

February 2016

Nesta is a registered charity in England and Wales with company number 7706036 and charity number 1144091. Registered as a charity in Scotland number SCO42833. Registered office: 1 Plough Place, London, EC4A 1DE. (CC BY NC SA license)