NHS Horizons is a specialist team within the Transformation Directorate of NHS England.
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:
- Delivering tech-enabled, large-scale change through virtual accelerated design events
- Crowdsourcing and virtual collaboration
- Building the capacity of change agents across the system
- Creating spaces to share learning
- Promoting the spread and scale of specific innovations, methods and frameworks for change
- Leveraging social influence to enable learning
- 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.
