North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust
Research and innovation
In 2017, North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust and Teesside University signed an agreement to form a powerful strategic partnership that is designed to enhance innovation in healthcare and education in the Tees Valley.
Challenge
North Tees and Hartlepool NHS wanted to look at ways to enhance innovation in healthcare and education in the Tees Valley within budget. The Trust wanted to overcome the reluctance to invest and to develop ideas into prototypes. They also wanted to look into ways of keeping recognition for the development of new technologies with the NHS, and reducing NHS IP being sold to private companies.
Solution
North Tees and Hartlepool NHS Foundation Trust and Teesside University signed an agreement to form a powerful strategic partnership, to work in collaboration through advanced education, training, research and innovation within the healthcare environment.
Teesside University and the Trust joined the Academic Health Science Network for the North East and North Cumbria to increase innovation.
The University has specifically helped the trust overcome their own resistance to how innovation should be funded. The trust wanted to harness the good ideas and work with industry partners to test these on the front line.
The Trust worked with the engineering department with students working on projects to take to the point of testing, so they can access top-of-the-range skills, brilliant facilities and industry partners to develop ideas together.
Impact
Since the signing of the strategic partnership, two innovation projects have been particularly progressive.
The first student project was for a birthing stool to support patients in labour and birth. The University provided in-house design, model exploration and was built by Dr David Hughes and engineering students in just six months from commission. A robust prototype was built from infection-control materials, which has been used in active birthing classes and in birth. An evaluation programme is being rolled out, involving up to 10 mothers, to explore its viability. The University has been instrumental in taking this idea from prototype to evaluation with live patients, is hoping to finalise the innovation.
The engineering department is working on the second project, which is a leg lifter prototype, following an idea by the Trust’s back care advisor. Many patients with back problems are unable to lift their legs whilst sitting down which creates ulcers and wounds – this means that carers try to help lift patients’ legs, which can weigh up to a stone, to treat them and then end up being off work themselves with back injuries. A concept was drawn up and within weeks had an approach for how it could work and are now seeking to develop it and commercialise it in the long-term.
The Trust has also worked with the University on a mobile app and video production and NHS consultants are going into the School of Health & Social Care as guest lecturers.
