Member Article

£450k North East healthcare funding pot made available

A funding pot of £450k has been made available to healthcare organisations undertaking innovative projects in patient safety across the North East.

The call out has come from the Academic Health Science Network for the North East and North Cumbria (AHSN NENC) as part of the 5-year Patient Safety Collaborative (PSC) work programme.

The programme aims to improve healthcare in the region by identifying and supporting innovative projects across a range of areas that can help transform processes that impact on the safety of patients.

The £450k will be used to fund between three and five projects that can demonstrate safety-related priorities, how their project will engage and involve a range of organisations and ultimately how they will benefit patient safety in the North East and North Cumbria.

Ideally, projects will form collaborations between the NHS and other organisations from a range of sectors, universities, the voluntary sector and commercial partners and will build on existing initiatives to spread learning more widely.

Organisations that would like to bid for funding have until the end of the month to submit applications.

National patient safety data sources and clinical evidence has highlighted some key patient safety issues affecting the quality of care across all NHS providers. Two of these – measurement and leadership - have been selected as themes that will be relevant for all PSC programmes.

The AHSN NENC is also in the process of identifying other key priorities for improvement specifically focusing on the need here in the region.

The deadline for organisations interested in securing a share of the first wave of PSC funding is 5pm on Friday 30th January 2015. Each project proposal will be considered on its own merits, but the AHSN NENC would not normally award more than £100k to any individual project.

AHSN NENC Chief Executive Officer, Seamus O’Neill, said: “Since the launch of the Patient Safety Collaborative in October we have been working to identify our regional priorities for the programme and we will continue to undertake strategic planning in coming months which will inform funding decisions in years two to five. However, we want to quickly engage with this and stimulate collaboration.

“We are looking for projects that are transformative and capable of producing large scale change.

“We know there is already a wealth of outstanding work in the patient safety field already taking place throughout the North East and North Cumbria and we want to hear from those organisations – whether they be businesses, universities or NHS organisations.”

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