Health Innovation Manchester as AHSS – the Test of a Hypothesis

The ambitious and wide-ranging paper on Academic Health Science Systems [‘AHSS’] [1] proposed a new model for health innovation and stimulated considerable interest. The paper made three main assumptions about AHSS: i) university-based centres should play linchpin roles in health and social care innovation; ii) medical innovation cannot be achieved without links to industry; iii) innovation occurs at the scientific end of a discovery-care continuum. But the paper had a pregnant coda for the NHS, and GM devolution in particular: the authors explicitly linked their view of the need for the integration of university-based research and health care delivery to population level approaches, suggesting that vertically integrated AHSSs should ultimately transform into integrated care organisations. When Manchester’s experiment in the devolution of health and social care as a place-based approach to health and social care began in 2015, Health Innovation Manchester was created as an AHSS to support innovation in the Partnership. Five years after the start of devolution, this short paper, which is based on a longer study of Health Innovation Manchester’s development [2], provides an overdue reflection on the proposition advanced just over a decade ago [1].