Transforming health and care delivery through innovation

Sciana Fellow Richard Stubbs reflects on his Sciana experience, leadership, and the role of innovation and research in healthcare

Richard Stubbs is chief executive of Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber, working with the NHS, academic partners, and health innovators to support the transformation of health and care delivery through innovation. He is also chair of the national Health Innovation Network, bringing together all 15 health innovation networks across England to deliver national impact. 

In addition to these roles, Richard holds several varied non-executive and voluntary roles. He is a long-standing member of the NHS Assembly, a board member of NHS England's Accelerated Access Collaborative and a member of the Innovation Ecosystem Programme Advisory Group. Internationally, Richard is a member of the International Health Federation's Global Scientific Committee, which curates their annual World Hospital Congress. He has just completed his term as an advisor to Healthcare UK in the Department for Business and Trade. Richard is co-chair of the NHS Confederation's BME Leadership Network, chair of the advisory board for Sheffield Hallam University's Advanced Wellness Research Centre, and chair of the NIHR HealthTech Research Centre in Paediatrics and Child Health. He is a member of Sciana's fifth cohort.

This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.

Sciana Network: How would you describe your experience of participating in the Sciana Network? 

Richard Stubbs: This has been one of the most rewarding and developmental experiences of my professional life so far. It is very hard to succinctly describe the journey and the impact of being a Sciana Fellow, but we were asked to do just that when we met Cohort Six for the first time; our headlines were Place, People, Process, Play and Passion, which I think is a great shorthand for what makes this programme so special.  

It is always a real privilege to be given the space to think but to be given the space to think in this kind of setting is almost unbelievable. And to do so within a cohort of international health experts is hugely educational and humbling, and so important due to the obvious fact that there are an awful lot of global challenges that are shared by health systems across the world. And we need to get better at identifying those challenges, recognising the commonalities, and working together to start solving them. Sciana is amazing in terms of creating and nurturing those important cross-border relationships and common causes. 

And Salzburg Global is equally important to those aims. I'm particularly interested in the links between education, economic growth, and health. So, I'm equally delighted to also be a Salzburg Global Fellow and looking forward to engaging with the Fellowship on these issues. 

Sciana Network: What do you see as the role of academia in relation to the day-to-day challenges faced by the healthcare system in the UK?

RS: I think academia is incredibly important, and one of the reasons why Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber exists in the first place is to help to accelerate the translation of discovery science into widespread frontline use. Our health research ecosystem, both in the NHS and in industry, is globally leading. What we haven't historically been great at is taking those evidence-based, needs-based solutions and systematically adopting them everywhere where they would be beneficial. And doing so with speed so that patients get the value immediately. We need to do this better, and that's a major part of my role in the NHS.    

That means that we have to think about how innovation is used in real-world settings, not just in a more standardised, clinical-trial-type environment. More and more in the UK, we're talking about the importance of real-world evaluation, which I think is another area where our academic institutions can really play a role. 

So how do you put something into the day-to-day NHS system, in a patient's hand, in the clinician's hands, or multiple clinicians' hands, and have a real academic rigour to evaluate what the actual benefits are when used in a normal care setting, as opposed to something that's a little bit more sterile, a little bit more controlled, and then start to understand if it truly delivers benefits. 

Equally, how do we ensure that the focus of our academic research is informed by the real priorities and pressure points faced by the healthcare system? No innovation will scale nationally unless it actually addresses a clear and important need within healthcare. So, we also need to be better at demand signalling so that our research outputs are designed to meet the challenges that the system is facing. 

SN: You currently hold multiple leadership positions in various health organisations and networks. What is one lesson about leadership that you would want to pass on to the next generation? 

RS: This is definitely something that I've gradually uncovered about myself rather than something that I have deliberately tried to nurture, but when I look at the roles that I do now and some of the jobs that I have done in the recent past, there is a theme about breaking down silos and working across boundaries. I think I have a natural curiosity (and nosiness!) to look outside my own world and see what others do, coupled with a desire to build teams. What that means for me in my current role is that I spend a lot of my time identifying all the different rooms in the same region that are trying to come at what I would consider to be healthcare challenges but coming at them from different ends of the telescope from health organisations. 

So, whether that's about education or whether that's about economic growth, there's an awful lot of people outside of healthcare who also have health responsibilities. And I certainly would advise leaders to not just think about the solutions that exist within their own four walls but to think about who else is a potential partner who may actually be working in a completely different sector but actually has a really compelling opportunity to collaborate and to help solve problems together. 

And maybe my real leadership lesson is actually that it's great to find ways to bring your natural skill set and energy into your role and find ways in which you can use your leadership style, which comes more easily to deliver your professional objectives.

SN: How do you manage your time and energy for your various roles for different bodies? What advice would you share with others looking to take on additional responsibilities?

RS: Basically, I only consider myself to have one job. My job is to accelerate the adoption of innovation in my region, to benefit patients, and to create economic growth. What that means is that I only take on additional roles that allow me to continue to deliver my day job. In fact, many of these roles don't just allow me to continue to deliver; they help me to be impactful in ways that I couldn't be if I tried to do my job only in my silo. A great example of this might be the work I do for my local mayor as a member of his Mayoral Economic Advisory Committee, which allows me to champion the health and life science sector as an economic growth priority for our region, hopefully bringing jobs, investment, and innovation closer to my citizens and patients. Similarly, if we are going to create high-value jobs, then we need to make sure our children have the skills required, which is why I'm connected to the local school system in the pit village where I grew up.

I definitely couldn't do these roles if they were all completely different from each other and from my day job. So, I guess my advice when thinking about taking on additional responsibilities is to consider not just what you can bring to that role but how does that role also help you in delivering your own objectives?

SN: What is one innovation that you think has the potential to revolutionise the healthcare industry? 

RS: I think it's probably an obvious one to go with, but when you think about the budget constraints of care provision these days, particularly in the UK, there's something incredibly imaginative and exciting about the fact that almost everybody has a smartphone. Smartphones weren't invented to be health innovation devices, but they absolutely are. 

One of my favourite innovations, which uses smartphone technology, is from a company called Healthy IO, and they have a diagnostic – well, a set of diagnostic opportunities  – delivered through smartphone technology. It can be about urine analysis, it can be about wound care management and a number of different things, but they've taken really basic, but usually hospital or primary care-based diagnostics and put them into patients' hands in their own home with an app and a kit that gets posted through a letterbox. 

When you think about the kind of patients who need to have wound care measurements on a four times weekly basis or have their urine analysed twice a month, these are the kind of patients who are taking two or three busses to get to hospital just for that service. They are asking friends and family to give them lifts and to take time off work to be able to get them to and from healthcare providers. Just revolutionising the fact that these are things that now can happen in the comfort of your own home at the patient's convenience, I think is... that for me is the more interesting bit of healthcare innovation. 

There are obviously some amazing technical scientific breakthroughs around genomics and about machine learning and AI, and that's fantastic, too. But I personally like the really basic, simple to understand but mass market opportunities for transformation that will just help us to re-imagine why somebody needs to come towards a healthcare practitioner when we can actually bring the service to them instead. There's no doubt that generative AI and genomics will revolutionise the way that we deliver healthcare in just a few years, but so will the smaller things if we put them in the hands of everyone who needs them, and I think that's great.