Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, a long-standing pioneer in innovation, has formed a first-of-its-kind partnership with Strasys, a leading analytics and innovation agency. Together, they aim to reshape the future of paediatric care and enhance the life prospects of children, young people, and their families (CYPF).
The needs of CYPF are changing at pace, driven by socio-economic and technological developments. The net impact is a health system under pressure with growing inequalities and adverse effects on the well-being of communities. To create new solutions to our problems requires collaboration, innovation and investment.
Together, Alder Hey and Strasys have launched a partnership that aims to develop an innovation-at-scale platform, bringing together funders, public and private sectors, researchers and educators to develop and scale novel solutions to address unmet needs.
This partnership places a special focus on addressing children’s unmet needs, ensuring that their voices are heard, and their healthcare environment is conducive to their growth and well-being.
Building on their collective knowledge, values, and expertise, the partnership has four aims:
- Be the engine to originate, create and scale solutions to benefit CYPF and communities.
- Create the best adoption environment for partners with innovative ideas to incubate and scale their solutions.
- Leverage knowledge capital and domain expertise to deliver value to innovation partners through new collaboration methods.
- Build the headroom to scale up and reinvest in improving outcomes for CYPF.
The partnership’s initial focus will be to develop and scale the existing pipeline of innovations leveraging AI and analytics and developing a global centre of excellence for paediatric research, innovation, and education.
Louise Shepherd, CEO, Alder Hey Children’s NHS Foundation Trust and Chair of NHS England’s Children and Young People (CYP) Transformation Board, said: “Children, young people and families are facing significant challenges with huge increases in demand, complexity and widening inequalities. Alder Hey is a very special place with an international reputation. Working closely with children and partners, we have no shortage of ideas and a new Alder Hey vision for 2030, to tackle these challenges head-on. We needed to work with a partner that could offer us something unique to enable us to create a global centre of excellence for CYPF innovation and accelerate the introduction of new technologies to improve children’s care in the UK and beyond.”
“We didn’t want a cookie-cutter approach. Strasys had already helped us fundamentally reshape our future. The partnership will increase our self-resilience, reducing our dependency on external support. It will enable us to accelerate a range of innovations, accessing the best ideas and turning them into solutions to improve life chances and outcomes for young people.”
“I am excited to be working in partnership with Alder Hey to build an international value-creation platform for CYPF. Our depth of expertise, global presence and a rich network of partners would not typically be accessible within the constraints of the NHS. I am very much looking forward to creating and nurturing an experimental environment that supports people to put their ideas into practice and co-developing a range of disruptive innovations to support thousands more people locally and globally.”
Naeem Younis, Founder and CEO, Strasys
Alder Hey has an international reputation for outstanding specialist paediatric health care, research and innovation. The partnership will help us to take Alder Hey innovations and solutions to more children and young people and professionals, broadening our impact and providing better and more effective care to children’s unmet needs.
Strasys will bring its intellectual property, products and capability development expertise to support Alder Hey and health systems to improve care and outcomes for children. They remain committed to providing the best value for taxpayers and the most effective, fair, and sustainable use of finite resources.