What is The Innovators Approach? 

The Innovators programme approach is a way to enable bottom up change by upskilling frontline staff to become leaders, strengthening cross-sector partnerships and building the capacity of the system to solve their own challenges.

1. Are you thinking about how services can be more proactive in supporting local communities? 
2. Do you want to ensure the voices of local people and partners are reflected in service improvements? 
3. Would you like to develop the capability of services to innovate and increase the number of frontline leaders in transformation work? 
4. Do you want to make a sustainable and scalable difference to local communities?

If you answered YES to any of those questions, you may want to develop an Innovators Programme – Find out how in The Innovators Toolkit, below.

The Innovators Toolkit

The Innovators Toolkit helps you to:

• Develop leaders on the frontline of services who can innovate against widespread challenges
• Embed a sustainable approach to enable meaningful bottom-up change in health and care
• Drive transformation of services through community-led development, partnership working and continuous improvement.

 Selected pages from the Innovators Toolkit – click to enlarge

What you’ll find in the Toolkit

• A background to the Innovators approach and why investing in the frontline is so important for improving services
• A step-by-step guide to the approach including resources, time, tools and assets required to drive this work
• Golden threads of the Social Prescribing Innovators Programme and how we embedded this throughout

The Toolkit shares learnings from the Social Prescribing Innovators Programme pilot.

The Social Prescribing Innovators Programme embedded a cost-effective approach to enable bottom-up change by upskilling frontline staff to become leaders, strengthening cross-sector partnerships and building the capacity of the system to solve their own challenges.

Key threads of the Innovators Approach include:

1. Partnership and collaboration
2. Quality Improvement and coproduction 
3. Flexibility and continuous improvement
4. A strong vision to rally around

If you’re interested to hear more about the Innovators Programme or apply a similar approach in your area, read the Innovator’s Toolkit linked above.

If you’d like to explore this or have any questions about the approach, please contact rf-tr.socialprescribing@nhs.net

Find out more about the impact of the Pilot Social Prescribing Innovators Programme here.