NHS Innovation Accelerator Evaluation

Final report

This report presents the evaluation of the NHS Innovation Accelerator (NIA), led by IES in partnership with researchers from York Health Economics Consortium.

The NIA was created to help address the priorities of improving take-up of innovations in the NHS as expressed in the Five Year Forward View goals. It is intended to help create conditions and cultural change so that healthcare innovations are adopted faster and more systematically and deliver practical examples for patient and population benefit.

It was created by NHS England together with UCLPartners, Academic Health Science Networks and The Health Foundation to offer a range of customised and dedicated support for 17 individuals, or 'Fellows', to scale innovations with the goals of improving patient outcomes whilst maintaining or reducing service costs.

This evaluation, funded by the Health Foundation, covered the first cohort of the NIA and assessed:

• what the impact of the NIA has been on Fellows, its strengths and areas for development;
• how far the innovations have scaled;
• potential benefits for patient and population health and wider cultural change through the NHS and non-NHS organisations;
• factors which influenced uptake of innovations; and
• the current and potential impact of each innovation in terms of patient/population health benefits, organisational and wider health system costs.

This report is based on two rounds of interviews with the 17 Fellows held six months apart; seven staff involved in NIA development and/or delivery; a first wave of interviews with 74 stakeholders and patients; and a second wave of interviews with a further 45 stakeholders and patients, 14 of which were new interviewees for the second wave.

To read a brief summary of the key findings from IES, click here.