Regional Innovation Funds Advisory Service (RIFAS) is joint venture between NESTA and the Young Foundation working to support, advise and increase the capacity of the UK's Strategic Health Authorities (SHAs) to discharge their statutory duty to innovate.

Each SHA has a Regional Innovation Fund to stimulate the invention, implementation and spread of innovative ideas in their area. RIFAS supports each of the SHAs in the management of their fund, including the selection, support and evaluation of projects. More generally, through practical examples and the development of specific techniques and knowledge, RIFAS aims to increase the NHS's capacity and ability to recognise and support new models of service delivery. The advisory service works to extract and generate learning for SHAs, NHS frontline staff and the wider community to foster service innovation by actively seeking and supporting new ideas and methods.

RIFAS is also working to build strategic partnerships with key contributors such as the NHS Institute for Innovation and Improvement, Innovation Hubs and Health Innovation and Education Clusters to support the conditions needed to incubate innovation within the NHS. As a joint venture between NESTA and the Young Foundation the advisory team benefits from extensive commercial and health sector experience including finance, evaluation, project management and clinical expertise from both the public and private sectors. RIFAS was formed in response to  several drivers of change including the recent economic downturn, the call for £20 billion in savings within the NHS and the need to implement changes to the health sector as illustrated in High Quality Care For All: NHS Next Stage Review.

Key Reading:

• Innovation in Health: Approaches from the Regional Innovation Funds. This paper sets out the case for innovation in the health service and illustrates the role the Regional Innovations funds have to play within this.

• Social Impact Bonds in Health. Social Impact Bonds are a potentially very powerful instrument for creating change and improvement. This short paper describes the basic structure of social impact bonds, why they might be useful for the public sector, and some of the issues that need to be considered for implementation.

Regional Innovation Fund Projects.