About Us

About Us

Everything you need to know about NHS Horizons

The Horizons Team - This Is What We Do sketchnote
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NHS Horizons supports leaders of change, teams, organisations and systems to think differently about large-scale change, improve collaboration, and accelerate change. We work with the health and care system, the wider public sector and publicly-funded healthcare systems globally.

Driven by our deep connection to the founding principles of the NHS, the purpose of the Horizons team is to amplify and boost the efforts of others to deliver transformation and large-scale improvement, and to accelerate new change thinking and practices in line with the priorities of the NHS and its people.

Our purpose

NHS Horizons’ purpose is to amplify the efforts of others to deliver transformation and large-scale improvement, and to accelerate new change thinking in line with the priorities of the NHS.

We have:

  • Ambition to work with partners to deliver large-scale continuous learning and change
  • Restlessness with how change is done, curiosity and quest to do things differently for better, quicker, wider outcomes
  • Confidence in tech-enabled connections that give voice and power to many
  • Belief that it is better when people lead their own change
  • Energy and pace to act as change agents within the formal systems.

We achieve this by:

  • Use large-group engagement and complex problem-solving techniques to address system issues.
  • Support senior leaders, teams and integrated care systems to co-design and undertake large-scale change in evidence-based, effective and sustainable ways.
  • Co-design and facilitate deliberative events and workshops that link policy and programme leaders with practitioners to enable breakthrough thinking and practice.
  • Convene a range of networks and manage communities to accelerate collective learning and improvement.
  • Generate new insights that support our clients to create new options in their work and to increase their overall impact.
  • Building the capacity of change agents across the system
  • Promoting the spread and scale of specific innovations, methods and frameworks for change
  • Convening and growing networks and communities of action.

NHS Horizons is deliberately small. There is a core team of staff, plus a group of associates, secondees and international sabbaticals. We work on the basis that a small team can leverage its activities to make a very big impact through its connections, networks and partnerships.

Leaders who have commissioned NHS Horizons report that working with us has given them new and fresh perspectives about change; more systematic approaches to change; greater engagement from the beginning; a stronger sense of shared purpose and of agency; more effective approaches to testing and prototyping; more confidence in working virtually, greater willingness to take risks and an acceleration of change.

Making Large Scale Change Happen
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