Medical professionals in Yorkshire are being asked to send details of challenges at work to one of the country’s top business schools, which is looking to find innovative solutions to their problems.
Bradford University School of Management is running a new programme to help businesses develop and sell health products to the NHS. As part of this, they need real-life challenges for clinicians, academics and businesses to work on.
Examples of problems already being tackled by other innovators include using the internet so that patients don’t have to attend hospital appointments and detecting breech babies without scanning.
The programme was founded by Elaine McNichol of the White Rose Health Innovation Partnership – a consortium of four Yorkshire universities – to help NHS professionals work with academics and industry.
Ms McNichol said: “Businesses complain that they don’t know how to sell to the NHS. This programme is designed to bring everyone together so both sides can learn from each other, with the help of academics, and innovate to improve healthcare for patients.
Professor Arthur Francis, dean of the School of Management, is teaching on the innovation module. He said: “Innovation has to be based on trust and communication between those who use an innovation and those who produce it.
“That’s why we are looking for challenges from hospitals, laboratories, GPs, district nurses and therapists – anyone in healthcare – to see if our teams can solve patient problems through collaboration.”
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