Understanding service innovation

This 50-hour online course is aimed at doctors, nurses or allied health professionals working within the health service at various stages in their careers. It focuses on innovation in general and health care innovation in particular to help you understand how to take forward innovations in your own service. This course is intended to be taken after earlier courses, however, if you have used some other opportunities to assess how your service currently functions and how it might be improved, this course can also be usefully studied on its own to help you take your improvement ideas forward.

What you will study

Understanding service innovation is the first of three 50 hour online Continuing Professional Development (CPD) courses in the series ’Leading Health Care Innovation’. This course, like the whole series, is for clinicians who want to understand what leadership in service innovation means for them. But it is not intended only or even primarily for clinicians who wish to take on full-time medical or clinical management positions. It is for those who recognise that developing and health services and finding innovative ways to meet current and future challenges require practising clinicians to show leadership in a variety of ways, working alongside health service managers.

To obtain the maximum benefit from this course, you should previously have completed the sequence of CPD courses making up the series ‘Diagnosing and Improving Your Service’, within the overall BMJ-OU clinical leadership programme. However, this course can very usefully be studied on its own and will help you crystallize how to take your improvement ideas forward.

This course examines what is driving innovation within health care generally, and how health service policy may be supporting and driving innovation within your own service. It includes a detailed review of the extensive research literature on innovation in general and health care innovation in particular, to help you understand the varieties of innovation that may be relevant to your service and the issues likely to be encountered during the process of adopting and implementing an innovation. The course examines the supports and barriers to innovating within your service and helps you identify and map the various stakeholders who are important to innovation within your service, and to analyse their perspectives on innovations you have thought are relevant to improving the performance of your service. The course helps you to focus on understanding your own possible role in taking innovations forward, and how your personal strengths make you currently more or less prepared to take up these roles. Finally you will bring together your learning to document and explain some outline proposals for innovation within your service, and indicate your possible role in taking these proposals forward.

You will learn

On completing this course you will be able to analyse how the context within which your service operates is both driving innovation and also possibly restricting it, including the relevance of service commissioning or service planning. You will be able to assess the motivations of different stakeholders in your service in terms of kinds of innovation they welcome and what they are likely to be concerned about or fear. You will also be able to identify which areas of innovation are more relevant to your service (a) for the coming six to 12 months (b) over the next five years. You will assess which approaches to the process of innovating are likely to be successful given the concerns of stakeholders within your services and the resources available to it. This will enable you to identify the kind of role you might take up in the process of innovation over the coming months, and the implications for how you will need to develop your personal competencies.

Entry

Although there are no formal academic requirements to study any of our CPD courses, you are expected to have some experience in the field and the course assumes a familiarity with the subject. However, if you want to go on to complete the Postgraduate Certificate in Clinical Leadership (K04) it is required that you hold an honours degree or equivalent.

This course has been developed in conjunction with BMJ Learning. If you register for this course, they would like to contact you about further learning opportunities. If you do not want to receive information from BMJ, please mark the relevant opt-out box on your registration agreement.

You can register and begin this course at any time during the life of the course. You can study at your own pace and submit your work-based activity at any date before the final submission date for the course. Information about the final submission date is available when you register for the course.

This module counts towards the assessment module Leading healthcare innovation (B833), which forms part of the Postgraduate Certificate in Clinical Leadership (K04). If you are working towards this postgraduate qualification you have two choices. You can either complete some or all of the requisite CPD courses prior to registering for B833 or you can register for B833 and the CPD courses at the same time, following a recommended study pattern. Please be aware that the latter option will require you to commit to approximately 12 hours of study per week so you may wish to consider this when making your choice.

If you have any doubt about the suitability of the course, please contact our Student Registration & Enquiry Service.

Outside the UK

This course has been written primarily for a UK context, but will have relevance to other contexts.

If you have a disability

The study materials are delivered online. Learners who use screen readers or who cannot use a mouse will not be able to access some materials or some activities without assistance. Written transcripts of the audio interviews are available on the website. If you are a new learner with the OU, make sure that you have our publication Meeting Your Needs.

Study materials

What's included

All learning materials, exercises, study support and work-based activity are delivered entirely online.

Computing requirements

You will need a computer with internet access to study this course as it includes online activities, which you can access using a web browser.

• If you have purchased a new desktop or laptop computer since 2007 you should have no problems completing the online activities.
• If you’ve got a netbook, tablet or other mobile computing device check our Technical requirements section.
• If you use an Apple Mac you will need OS X 10.6 or later.

You can also visit the Technical requirements section for further computing information including the details of the support we provide.

Learner support

Expert, confidential learner support is available when you need it from a learning adviser, who will respond to you direct within 24 hours. Other support is available via the course forum, library, StudentHome website and computing helpdesk.

Work-based activity

The work-based activity for this course has been designed as an integrated ongoing activity that you submit at the end of your study. It will enable you to reflect on your learning and apply it to your professional work.

Your questions

Try our frequently asked questions.

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