Alder Hey Innovation, housed within the globally recognised Liverpool children’s hospital, has today announced its strategy to unleash the power of innovation to deliver solutions to the healthcare problems faced by children and young people.
The strategy, Todays Child, Tomorrow’s Healthier Adult, seeks to do this by focusing on acute and chronic childhood conditions such as asthma, obesity, and neurodevelopmental conditions, and developing physical, digital, and automated solutions to optimise healthcare delivery and resources.
Professor John Chester, Director of Research and Innovation at Alder Hey Children’s NHS Trust, said: “Alder Hey is a place of outstanding care, amazing people, and world leading clinicians. But our ambition goes beyond the day-to-day and the bounds of our hospital. This Innovation Strategy will ensure that we focus on solving the real-world problems children, young people and families face, providing solutions to create healthier, happier, fairer futures for children our region and globally.”
Claire Liddy, Managing Director of Alder Hey Innovation, said: “At the heart of Alder Hey is a commitment to innovate. We are the problem solvers, with a restless impulse to break new ground.
“We focus sharply on the needs of children, young people and families, and this gives us emotional purpose, driving us to deliver the biggest impact.
“We believe in the opportunity that technology offers as we seek to address the challenges faced. Through harnessing technology, creative thinking and, crucially, through powerful partnerships with those that share our vision, we believe we can tackle today’s healthcare challenges.”
Alder Hey Innovation is a health-led and place-led innovation incubator with extensive industry ecosystem and commercial focus. It boasts the largest dedicated health Innovation Centre in the UK with over 30 full time experts working out of a 1000sqm Centre embedded in the hospital.
Some of Alder Hey Innovations current projects include:
- Little Hearts at Home, a remote monitoring solution that will enable new-born and infants with a severe Congenital Heart Defect to receive care within the comfort of their homes – the first of its kind in the UK.
- As One Mental Health Platform, a mental health integrated platform, co-created with Children and Young People & professionals, that brings together a single point of access for referrals, support and resources.
- Lab 2 Life, A data lab committed to tackling healthcare inequalities caused by poverty in the UK. We are achieving this through research and programmes linking with national expertise.
- WNB – Reducing Healthcare Inequalities. In the NHS, non-attendance of an appointment is termed ‘Was Not Brought (WNB)’. Alder Hey WNB AI (artificial intelligence) tool can quickly identify those children that have a higher predictability of a WNB enabling staff to provide a bespoke support to help them attend their appointments.