Innovation, Collaboration, Community: Health & Life Science in the North-West
Two major cross-border health programmes were launched at Ulster University recently, marking a significant step in tackling shared health challenges across the North-West. Together, these initiatives will reach nearly 19,000 people. PEACETIME (https://www.ulster.ac.uk/peacetime) will deliver community-based services for managing obesity-related conditions, while iMPROVE (https://www.ulster.ac.uk/improve) will introduce new care pathways to optimise prescribing in primary care. Both projects are designed for scale and sustainability, with the ambition of delivering lasting, system-wide impact.
A main priority for Department for the Economy (DfE), Minister Caoimhe Archibald, is regional balance as per DfE’s sub-regional economic plan published in October 2024. The outlook remains one of variable growth across council areas. For instance, the range in employment rate between Mid and East Antrim, the council area with the highest rate (79.5 per cent) and Derry City and Strabane, the council area with the lowest rate (65.4 per cent) is 14 per cent.
Rather than relocating economic activity away from where it already exists, the Minister explains, the objective is to ensure “that everybody has an opportunity to develop their local economy”.
TheiMPROVE and PEACETIMEprojects are designed for scale and sustainability, with the ambition of achieving lasting, system-wide impact.
Anchors of Progress
Several large-scale projects now anchor this regional potential.
- The Ulster University School of Medicine, an £86 million project, is training a new generation of doctors grounded in “whole person care” while embedding research across three clusters: Translational Experimental Research, Clinical Medicine, and Public and Population Health. Phase 2 developments, including the MedEdWest teaching facility at Altnagelvin Hospital and an extension to the Clinical Translational Research Centre (C-TRIC), will further strengthen teaching and translational capacity.
- The Derry~Londonderry & Strabane City Deal, worth around £290 million, is investing in health, life sciences, and digital infrastructure, laying the foundations for innovation and long-term growth.
These anchors matter, yet investment alone is rarely sufficient to deliver transformation.
Why Innovation and Collaboration Must Be Done Strategically
To deliver real value, improved outcomes, reduced costs, and improved quality of life, innovation must be embedded within strong collaborative structures and underpinned by community trust.
- Value-based health care: Effective collaborations depend on shared goals, aligned incentives, trust, clarity of roles, and strong leadership.
- Sustainability: Long-term investment, combined with approaches that prioritise prevention and data-driven decision making, is essential. Constraints such as skills gaps, funding, and regulatory guidelines can be reframed as enablers when approached with innovation and creativity.”
- Community engagement: Communities must be active partners, not passive recipients of care. Effective engagement requires early co-design, responsiveness to local contexts, trust, and continuous feedback loops. Without this, innovation is at risk, with programmes unable to adapt to differences in culture, resources, or access.
What Comes Next?
The iMPROVE and PEACETIME programmes already demonstrate how the region is tackling systemic challenges, particularly around skills, digitalisation, and data governance.
- Skills: iMPROVE is building new competencies in pharmacogenomics, while PEACETIME reflects the shift towards more preventative, person-centred models of care.
- Data: Both initiatives also depend on robust, interoperable data systems. iMPROVE must manage genomic and prescribing data securely, while PEACETIME requires longitudinal tracking of outcomes across communities.
These programmes reflect important progress, but they also highlight the next step: moving towards sustainable, outcomes-based, digitally enabled models of care.
To achieve this, the region can draw on established implementation frameworks such as the NASSS framework (Non-adoption, Abandonment, Scale-up, Spread, and Sustainability). Such frameworks help assess how new technologies interact with health systems and adopting organisations, and how innovations can be embedded and sustained over time
HIRANI strongly endorses this direction of travel, and through our cluster-building activities we are helping to ensure that new models are tested, evaluated, and scaled in ways that embed learning across the whole ecosystem.
Key Regional Assets
The North-West has what many regions aspire to: cross-border proximity, emerging infrastructure investment, academic capacity, and programmes with the potential to reach widely.
As Professor David Gibson reflected at the launch, “to see these structures in Magee today, giving opportunities that weren’t there when I was growing up here, fills me with pride.” His words capture the importance of anchoring innovation in place and community.
Realising the Collaboration Dividend
The North-West is poised to achieve more than improved health outcomes. It has the chance to generate a true collaboration dividend. The region can become a genuine testbed, a place where innovation is not only trialled but lived, not only funded but sustained, and not only for some but for all.
