Our Focus

Our aim at Health Launchpad is to make a tangible difference to the quality of life of people with long term conditions while helping professionals to meet the challenges of the changing landscape of health care.

A number of organisations, inside and outside the NHS, share a similar goal – so what makes HL different?

We offer a unique package.

 We seek out, devise and, via this web site, solicit innovative ideas and projects.

We provide entrepreneurial expertise, allied to an understanding of the current demands of government and the heath sector, so a proposal can be developed, tested, refined and evaluated as part of its transformation into a viable venture.

We help with all aspects of project development from business planning to engaging with key potential stakeholders and we offer funding phased in three stages. This allows a project to be piloted and then replicated or scaled to achieve maximum impact and benefits to people with long term conditions Short term success is not enough.

We record and disseminate the lessons learned in the process so other social innovators may be stimulated to turn their own ideas into practise, drawing lessons from our failures – and our successes.

Our website aims to build up a library of useful links, contacts, interviews and research papers as a resource for others working in similar areas.

“Improved support for people with long term conditions will demand wholesale change in the way health and social care services deliver care,’ wrote Dr David Colin-Thome,  GP National Clinical Director for Primary Care, in 2005, in the foreword to Supporting People with Long Term Conditions : Improving Care Improving Lives.

“As we progress, we must continue to gather our own best practice to identify and share learning. This will take us into the forefront of international progress and innovation. The challenge is to work across boundaries – both cultural and organisational – and develop the integrated, patient-centred services which will transform care for this growing group of people. “

Health Launchpad is in the business of turning those words into practise.

What can Health Launchpad deliver for the NHS that it perhaps finds difficult to deliver for itself – at the speed required?

Contrary to some opinion, people who work for the NHS are not necessarily resistant to change or risk averse. However, the aspirations and aims of the individual may sometimes run counter to the grain of the organisation for which he or she works.

The NHS, at sixty, faces innovation challenges common to any large complex organisation that has been successful over a period of time. With age, inevitably comes an institutionalised approach to what appears to work best and an embedded understanding of how things should be done. Both approaches run the risk of inadvertently locking out innovation; erasing ideas before they can properly germinate.

HL has the capacity to operate as a catalyst, working in tandem with the NHS, drawing on the talent, originality and expertise that the organisation has in plentiful supply but that it may have difficulty in utilising in the context of innovation.

HL is eager to forge alliances with PCTs, local authorities and local strategic partnerships to unleash that entrepreneurial potential and create ventures at a pace and effectiveness that meets current need.

Innovation is not just about clinical pathways, drugs and medical devices. It is also about people and processes and understanding better the way we behave as human beings – what triggers the turning points that make us consider a change in how we care for ourselves? What kind of relationships and practical tools foster positive health habits and encourage sustained self management?.

The HL team comprises a mix from the diverse worlds of community action, social entrepreneurship, social research and policy, venture capital, NHS management, clinical practise, business start ups and consulting.

HL’s goal is to make a lasting impact on peoples’ health and wellbeing in part by working with the innovatory talents of those who work within the NHS . Individual members of staff may have entrepreneuirial ideas but little time or opportunity to develop them – we provide the arena in which that can happen.

Communities of interest working together can make a difference – will you join this new alliance?