Our partners

Leading healthcare innovation together

Our national collective of 15 AHSNs is commissioned by NHS England and the Government’s Office for Life Sciences. We’re also a partner in the NHS Accelerated Access Collaborative, which brings together key organisations to streamline the adoption of new innovations in healthcare.

Partnering nationally and locally

Together, AHSNs work across the entire spectrum of organisations that operate within health and care innovation.

Each AHSN works with a number of partners in their local system, and we work with many more on a national level. Although there are too many to mention here, we run many collaborative programmes with the following organisations:

National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE)

NICE provides national guidance and advice to improve health and social care. It does this by providing independent assessments of complex evidence, developing recommendations and encouraging the uptake of best practice.

Health Education England (HEE)

HEE supports the delivery of excellent healthcare and health improvement by working with partners to plan, recruit, educate and train the health workforce of today and tomorrow.

National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR)

The NIHR funds, enables and delivers world-leading health and social care research that improves people’s health and wellbeing, and promotes economic growth.

Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI)

The ABPI works with its members, the Government and the NHS to enable patients to get new treatments faster and make the UK the best place in the world to research, develop and use new medicines and vaccines.

Association of British HealthTech Industries (ABHI)

The ABHI supports the healthtech community to save and enhance lives, representing the industry to stakeholders such as the Government, NHS and regulators.

How AHSNs work with ICSs

Find out more about how AHSNs are supporting their local ICSs by reading our case studies that have been published by the Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC).

Initiatives we support

We are also a partner in a number of other core initiatives that support health and care innovation. To learn more about these programmes, see our dedicated page.

Commercial agreements

While our overarching funding comes from NHS England and the Government’s Office for Life Sciences, for some programmes of work we develop joint working agreements with commercial organisations. In some instances this includes additional funding which enables the AHSNs and NHS to reach more patients, while ensuring the health and care system benefit from the very best innovations in health and care.

Known as a ‘transfer of value’ this could be a direct payment from industry to a regional AHSN towards an AHSN project or programme, or a secondment of staff from industry to support AHSN projects.

AHSN Commercial agreements

For transparency, each AHSN publishes information about individual transfers of value on their websites including reasons for entering the partnership.

See individual sites below

• East Midlands
• Eastern
• Health Innovation Manchester
• Health Innovation Network
• Imperial College Health Partners
• Kent, Surrey and Sussex
• North East and North Cumbria
• Innovation Agency: AHSN for the North West Coast
• Oxford