The Health Innovation Research Alliance Northern Ireland (HIRANI) are delighted to announce that seven innovative entrepreneurs from across Northern Ireland have been offered places on the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme.
Now in its 6th year and delivered by Anglia Ruskin University, the NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme had over 300 applications from staff across the NHS.
Through a very competitive application process, 170 individuals were shortlisted for the year long programme.
The NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme was founded in 2016 and has become the world’s largest entrepreneurial training programme in healthcare, helping to transform patient care across the NHS. Open to all NHS staff, the programme aims to nurture healthcare innovators from across the country and help them gain the commercial skills, knowledge, and experience to make their ideas become a reality.
In the first four years of the programme over 500 clinical entrepreneurs were recruited. Between them, 247 life science start-up companies have been created, over £270million of funding has been raised through investment largely from the private sector, and more than 30 million patients and users have benefited from the innovations.
HIRANI Chief Executive Officer, Joann Rhodes, said
“This is the first year the programme has included applicants from NI and we are delighted that seven of our Northern Ireland Clinical Entrepreneurs have been successful. They include a GP, surgeon, dentist, nurse, social care worker, paediatrician and consultant neurologist.
“The Programme plays a pivotal role in embedding innovation, creative thinking and entrepreneurship into the NHS. It is seen as the ‘gold standard’ for entrepreneurial workforce development and we at HIRANI have been collaborating with our partners NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme, Health and Social Care R&D and Invest Northern Ireland to make this happen, to benefit patients in Northern Ireland, the rest of the UK, and worldwide.”
The year long programme launches today, 24th February, with the Big Pitch event which includes a keynote session with Professor Stephen Powis, National Medical Director, NHS England and NHS Improvement, and panels with senior leaders including Matt Whitty, Director of Innovation, Research and Life Sciences and Chief Executive of the Accelerated Access Collaborative at NHS England and NHS Improvement.
The programme is part of the NHS’s Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC) which brings together industry, government, regulators, patients, and the NHS to remove barriers and accelerate the introduction of new ground-breaking treatments and diagnostics which have the potential to transform care.
