Programme
NHS Clinical Entrepreneurs Programme
The CEP was launched in NI in 2022, championed and run by HIRANI, funded by InvestNI, working in partnership with the Clinical Entrepreneur Team in NHS England.
We hold annual Pitstops hosted by Professor Tony Young, Head of Innovation at NHS England.
The Pitstops are two day events which include a full programme of talks and workshops for CEPs from across the UK networking with over Innovators from the NI health and life sciences ecosystem and create many collaborative connections to scale NI health innovation.
The NHS Clinical Entrepreneur Programme allows HSC staff, students studying healthcare degrees and post graduate students in any discipline related to health innovation (including health data, bio-engineering etc) to develop on an innovative idea which will benefit the wider patient and staff community throughout the HSC.
During the twelve-month programme, the clinical entrepreneurs develop their innovation further while learning new entrepreneurial skills through various meetups and webinar opportunities.
Programme
All-Ireland Medtech
The project aims to identify an improved MedTech adoption process within Health and Social Care (HSC) in NI and the HSE in Republic of Ireland (ROI), support smaller SMEs and start-ups to compete and encourage collaboration between industry and healthcare stakeholders.
As a project outcome, HIRANI and HIHI will develop a framework of recommendations to support SME innovation procurement in secondary care across the island of Ireland.
The project consisted of two in-person workshops with SMEs from NI and ROI held in March 2023 in Belfast, and May in Dublin. These included discussion around challenges for SMEs in health procurement. Following workshop one, a working group was established to seek input from healthcare and procurement representatives. The challenges identified were explored further via breakout groups at workshop two, held in May 2023 in Dublin. In addition to SME representatives, HSC, HSE procurement, policy and state agency representatives were in attendance for workshop two to make recommendations that aligned with health procurement needs.
