The Health and Care Infrastructure Research and Innovation Centre, HaCIRIC
Start Date: 01/09/2006
End Date: 31/08/2011
Project Status: Current
HaCIRIC is a unique collaborative venture between Imperial College and the universities, Loughborough, Reading and Salford. HaCIRIC is supported by a new five-year grant of £7.2m from the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and will create a unique source of skills and knowledge to inform the development of policy and practice for the provision of strategically critical healthcare infrastructures for the 21st century.
The launch of HaCIRIC comes at a time of profound change in the UK's health and social care services, with unprecedented investment to renew its built and technical infrastructure. Tens of billions of pounds are being spent building new hospitals and other facilities, as well as on new IT systems and medical technologies. Technological and scientific advances, new policies and care practices, and rising patient expectations all mean that the infrastructure planned today may not be suitable in twenty years' time. Ensuring the investment in infrastructure is right for the emerging forms of care delivery requires careful planning and innovative approaches, but this has proved a major challenge for policy makers and the care services. HaCIRIC is being created to tackle these challenges.
Aims
Modernising the health and social care infrastructure will require innovative approaches. HaCIRIC will help develop the tools and processes which will embed 'innovation as normal business' amongst those responsible for delivering the investment in infrastructure.
HaCIRIC’s programme has been developed in partnership with all the key stakeholders from the care system, including the Department of Health, the NHS, the Department of Trade and Industry and the construction and healthcare industries.
HaCIRIC is organised into seven research themes across the collaborating universities.
• Managing innovation in a context of technological change
• Procurement for innovation
• Innovative design and construction
• Care delivery practices
• Delivering improved performance through operations management
• Knowledge management in complex systems
• Design and evaluation of integrated systems
The Innovative Construction Research Centre (ICRC) at the University of Reading is responsible for the delivery of two themes.
‘Procurement for innovation’, led by Professor Will Hughes, will provide greater understanding of design, construction, maintenance and technological supply chains in the delivery of healthcare infrastructure facilities. This will be followed by guidance about: efficiency gains through rationalisation of supply chains, improvements to the management of information flow, the difficulties of procurement in the healthcare sector in general and the PFI in particular, and factors influencing performance and innovation in the delivery of healthcare infrastructure. The theme will build the case for performance based contracting in the healthcare sector.
‘Care delivery practices’, lead by Professor Colin Gray, will deliver increased understanding of the relationships between care pathways and the built and technical infrastructure. This will lead to the development of improved tools and processes for the planning and design of health facilities that deliver patient, health and organisational benefits.
For further information contact Shelagh McKay:
Please visit the main HaCIRIC website here
NEW - HaCIRIC International Conference 2009, Call for Papers. For more details, please click here