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What have we done so far?

Chief Executive Prof Gary Ford CBE highlights some key areas of progress

 

I am delighted to join the Oxford AHSN team which has done so much to develop partnership working across our member organisations in the last year.

We have two main aims:

  • To improve the health of our patients through speeding up adoption of innovation into practice
  • To support wealth creation in the Oxford AHSN partners and wider English economy.

We will achieve these aims by helping our partners be more successful through facilitating and supporting collaboration and partnership working.

The Oxford AHSN sees clinical networks as key to identifying innovation in healthcare that will improve patient outcomes and develop new pathways of care.  The networks will also identify pockets of excellence and disseminate them as widely as possible. It is very much a ‘bottom up’ rather than ‘top down’ approach.

We are supporting nine clinical networks (leads in brackets):

The plans for our other key work programmes – promoting research; wealth creation; informatics; and patient, public involvement, engagement and experience – are also taking shape.

Our core team is being established with a dedicated base on the Oxford Science Park as well as support to clinical networks and projects in the localities we cover. We should be fully operational by early 2014.

For our wealth generation work we are building on the world leading excellence of Oxford University. The ‘Oxford’ brand is very powerful to potential investors. There are considerable opportunities to make more of the wide range of skills, expertise and technology in the other universities, NHS organisations and industry partners across our region to stimulate innovation, lead and support clinical trials and develop products and services.

Across the whole area covered by the Oxford AHSN we will work to be the location of first choice for the life science industry. We are strengthening relationships with existing stakeholders across health, academia and industry. We held a successful ‘Introducing the Oxford AHSN’ event in Reading in November and a similar one is being held at the Oxford Science Park on 18 December. Similar events will be programmed throughout 2014 across the Oxford AHSN area.

One of our key challenges is to achieve effective communication with our current and potential future partners.

We aim to refresh the Oxford AHSN website early in the New Year – and make it the first port of call for all: Network staff, clinical networks, partners and public alike.

Look out for further updates in the next edition of this newsletter early in January – we need your involvement and suggestions to help the Oxford AHSN deliver genuine and lasting patient benefits and wealth generation across our region.