Weekly spotlight – Meet Christina Farrow, Deputy Director for Innovation at NHS England

In our team we work to get proven innovations that tackle the most urgent health challenges to patients faster, focusing on the communities with the greatest need. With the Academic Health Science Networks (AHSNs), which we commission, we:

• support the roll out at scale of transformative new treatments and technologies to patients
• increase the ability of systems and staff to adopt innovation
• support NHS systems and organisations to identify the big health issues for their local populations and to find potential innovative solutions
• share learning from real-world testing, to influence strategy and policy.

We commission the Clinical Entrepreneurs Programme which equips healthcare staff to innovate, and we support innovators in and outside the NHS to go from ground-breaking ideas to develop game-changing technologies which help solve patients’ health challenges.

Every innovation we support will be shaped by patient input, we focus on reducing health inequalities and reducing the NHS’ carbon footprint.