Liberating Ideas Award 2011: can your idea benefit the rest of the NHS?

• Enter your idea into the Capgemini and HSJ Liberating Ideas Award 2011 now

David Fillingham, former head of the Modernisation Agency and now helming the North West’s Advancing Quality Alliance, writes in this week’s HSJ that the NHS’s “many islands of excellence” rarely succeed in spreading their impressive improvements to neighbouring communities.

AQuA exists to ensure member organisations share advances in outcomes, safety, patient experience and value. Successes to date include falling mortality rates and improvements in stroke care and patient safety.

For the rest of the health service, though, failure to disseminate innovation is limiting its chance of tackling the NHS’s zeitgeist issue: rebuilding the service with fewer resources.

The Capgemini and HSJ Liberating Ideas Award, which launches for a second year, will address this challenge by helping to develop the best ideas so they can be taken up by the rest of the service.

In the coming weeks we will reveal full details of the Circle and HSJ Prize for Inspiring Innovation. This is intended to identify the standout piece of healthcare theory. The Liberating Ideas Award, on the other hand, wants to highlight work that has already made a practical difference in the organisations that have developed them and have the potential to make a much bigger splash.

There are exciting prizes for the best entries in all three of the award’s categories, we urge you to enter.

• Find out more about the Capgemini and HSJ Liberating Ideas Award 2011 - and enter your submission now!
• Read David Fillingham’s piece on sharing innovation across the NHS