An uncommon approach: four organisations selected to replicate health and social care interventions

Four organisations have each been awarded £145,000 by the Health Foundation to replicate successful health and care interventions using social franchising and licensing techniques. Social franchising and licensing are methods to replicate and scale interventions that have not yet been used widely in health care in the UK.

Over the next year, as part of the Health Foundation’s innovative programme Exploring Social Franchising and Licensing, the organisations will develop a replication model to widen use of proven interventions to make care better.

We’ve spent the last year working with Spring Impact and project teams from across the country to develop this new programme. We hope the programme will provide rich insights into whether social franchising and licensing can be used to systematically and sustainably spread health and social care interventions.

The projects are:

Scaling and replicating IRIS through social franchising

Lead organisation: IRISi 

IRIS is a successful general practice-based training, support and referral programme that improves the identification and support offered to people with experience of domestic violence and abuse (DVA). One in four women and one in six men will experience DVA during their lifetime, with DVA against women being more frequent and more severe, with long-lasting effects that also have an impact on children. IRIS will be replicated through social franchising so that the programme can be implemented more widely, and more people can be supported. IRISi, a social enterprise set up to house the programme, will support other sites to engage commissioners, and recruit and train staff.

Replicating Pathway’s homeless health hospital team model to towns and cities experiencing significant homelessness

Lead organisation: Pathway

Homeless patients attend emergency departments four times more often than the general population, are admitted eight times more often and stay three times as long. Ten hospitals have implemented Pathway’s integrated care model ensuring that homeless patients admitted to hospital have access to the health care they need and support to recover. Pathway will use social franchising or licensing to replicate the model in places with significant homeless populations that would benefit from adopting it.

Scale up, replication and licensing of the PINCER intervention

Lead organisation: The University of Nottingham

In a recent study, prescribing errors were identified in 5% of prescription items, with one in 550 items containing a severe (potentially life threatening) error. This equates to around 1.8 million serious prescribing errors in English general practices each year. PINCER is a successful pharmacist-led information technology intervention for reducing common medication errors in general practice prescribing, and has been incorporated into national guidelines to support medicines optimisation. PINCER will be replicated in GP surgeries across the country; helping them to protect patients at risk of errors, and reduce medication-related hospital admissions and deaths.  

Developing a licensed, social franchising model for regional hubs to roll out effective local multi-professional maternity training

Lead organisation: PROMPT Maternity Foundation

The PRactical Obstetric Multi-Professional Training (PROMPT) programme has been associated with a significant reduction in the number of babies with a low oxygen level at birth and also babies born with a permanent nerve injury following difficulties with their shoulders. Through social franchising and using a regional hub system, it is hoped that this improved implementation model will ensure that PROMPT training may be associated with the same improvements in outcomes across the country.

The new projects are currently subject to contracts being finalised.