The Design & Learning Centre for Clinical & Social Innovation was officially launched in 2016 and we are based at Discovery Park in Sandwich. The vision of the Design and Learning Centre is to make care better for people, by “making out-of-hospital care safer for both citizens and professionals.” The Design and Learning Centre operates to a set of values which are:

• To connect people together to explore, implement and own innovative solutions
•  To be creative in our approach and to provide people with the opportunity to do this in a physical or virtual space
• To encourage and give people the freedom to think differently and creatively
• To be open to and accept challenges in our quest to make care better for people
• To deliver changes in a way that makes them sustainable for the future and truly transforms the experience and delivery of health and social care

The Design and Learning Centre recognises that we are not alone in our ambition to make care better for people and have built up a number of partnerships and collaborations locally and internationally.

Locally the Design and Learning Centre in collaboration with the Academic Health Science Network (AHSN) Kent, Surrey & Sussex and the Medway and Swale Centre of Organisational Excellence (MaSCoE) have been recognised as the innovation facility for the Kent & Medway Sustainability and Transformation Partnership (STP) Clinical and Professional Boards. The collaboration will provide support covering a number of areas such:

• Technology and digital
• Workforce
• New ways of working and care models
• Evaluation

A number of the projects the team are working on have led to a number of partnerships being developed internationally. We are working with Sweden and Singapore as part of an international ESTHER Network and as part of the Push Project, we are working with the Kyoto University in Japan. In order to ensure the innovative solutions we work with are sustainable and effective, we need to be able to effectively evaluate their impact. The Design and Learning Centre does this through a range of tools that will support this such as the Kent Integrated Dataset and Kent Integrated Care Evaluation framework developed by the University of Kent’s Centre for Health Service Studies.