CHI Innovation Strategy.

In order to ensure that innovation projects deliver true improvements in outcomes and experiences for children, meaningful partnerships with families and children are of key importance. In the first instance, at the organisational level, we need to have access to parents and children to advise in relation to structures and standard approaches that are likely to ensure ongoing meaningful reflection of the centrality of the end user in developing innovations. This advisory group will importantly have unique personal insights into receiving care across CHI and will have the opportunity to receive training and education in innovation practice and CHI organisational structures so that they can provide fully informed guidance to CHI Innovation on broad principles and approaches. This structure, however, will not be sufficient to deliver the very specific type of advice and input required on a project-by-project level. This will necessarily need to come from the specific user cohort involved in the activity that is the subject of the innovation project. In these situations, the local child and family participants in innovation projects will need some level of information, training and context in order to contribute meaningfully to the project. This will require some input from the innovation team, from the child and family advisory panel and a set of clear and accessible policies and procedures around how this type of input should be optimised.

The new children’s hospital will be located in an area which will have significant capability and capacity for healthcare innovation with St James’s Hospital, Smart D8, the Guinness Enterprise Centre (GEC), the Digital Hub and several other organisations in the local area. There is significant potential on the campus, and in the immediate environment for collaborative innovation. With Smart D8 comes an existing network of local and community connections with whom we can work to ensure that CHI innovation can truly impact the local community in a meaningful way. The Children’s Health Foundation (CHF) supports CHI to provide the highest quality care to children. In addition to the vital funds raised by CHF to support research and innovation, their work drives strong brand awareness of CHI and community engagement nationally but also in the catchment and local area. CHF is a key partner for CHI in many areas and is key to CHI’s drive to deliver ‘added value’ over and above the routine provision of clinical care. The development of seed funding and collaborative funding pathways for innovation projects will be a key driver of innovation activity in the hospital.

The paediatric Academic Health Science Centre promises to bring a significant positive change to the way healthcare is delivered in CHI. With the highly integrated nature of this arrangement, CHI will have access to new opportunities, relationships, expertise and collaboration with 4 university partners. In the area of innovation, where the universities have developed an important set of skills, this promises to be of great benefit to CHI. Driving forward the marriage of expertise and opportunity across the hospital, universities and industry promises to develop new and exciting innovations. Robust relationships with industry partners are a key requirement for meaningful innovation in healthcare, where clinical staff have access to industry expertise to help develop clinical innovations and where industry can have reliable access to clinical sites and expertise for product development and testing. Establishing and developing these relationships will be important for CHI as we have seen in successful international sites, including our benchmark sites. 

Given the underdeveloped nature of hospital-based innovation infrastructures and the small size of Ireland, relationships at a national and international level will be very important for CHI. In light of the overlap with clinical, academic and industry roles in healthcare innovation, we will need to build relationships, alongside our academic and industry partners, with the HSE, Department of Health, Department of Further and Higher Education, Research, Innovation and Science to highlight our efforts, seek appropriate supports and contribute to the drive to develop policy in this area. In a similar vein, relationships with national bodies such as Enterprise Ireland and IDA Ireland, who play an important role in healthcare innovation and technology transfer, will be vital to develop to ensure that the wider innovation community is aware of the capabilities and opportunities available at CHI. 

In the same way that the content and delivery of healthcare is very different in children compared to adults, innovation in paediatrics is also unique in many respects. In this niche field, networks and relationships between leading children’s centres are very important, particularly for CHI where we are the single specialist children’s hospital for Ireland. The relationships we have built to date with other leading children’s hospitals in this area will need to be strengthened and broadened for the benefit of CHI and the international paediatric innovation community.