Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Innovation Hub Cambridge and Peterborough NHS Foundation Trust

Cambridgeshire and Peterborough face significant health inequalities, with a 10-year difference in life expectancy between the north and south of the county. In addition, Cambridge is consistently ranked as one of the most unequal cities in the country. The COVID-19 pandemic has further deepened these underlying inequalities.

Whilst Cambridge is home to world leading invention and idea generation, embedding these ideas across the local health and care system in Cambridgeshire and Peterborough has proven challenging. There is currently a lack of infrastructure and mechanisms to co-ordinate, monitor, track and successfully spread innovations that could reduce health inequalities and improve health outcomes.

A collaborative Innovation Hub is being developed to address these needs. The Hub will help bring together and coordinate key regional innovation, health and care, and academic stakeholders, to understand what drives health inequality and how implementing innovations may combat these. The Hub will also map existing innovations, target efforts to adapt successful innovations to the local context and improve system-wide readiness to adopt innovations.

The Innovation Hub will have citizen co-production at its heart. The public will be involved across all stages of Hub activity: from strategic direction setting and adapting innovations to the local context, through to evaluation of the project. This will empower the local population to take an active role in the future of their own health and care provision.

Learning and innovation adoption techniques will be shared via the Hub to upskill the local workforce and generate a sustainable approach to the spread of innovation.

Contact information

For more information about this project, please contact Dr Ewen Cameron, Executive Director of Improvement and Transformation, Cambridge University Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust