We know that taking part in art, culture and other creative activities is good for our health but, currently, we don't know the best way to make it part of our health and care services. Our project aims to address this problem by developing a new model - the 'Creative Health Board' - that will find new ways to fund these activities, link them more closely with health and care services, and make them available to people in communities with the highest risk of poor health. Creative Health Boards will be led by community assets - local charities, community groups, museums and theatres - and involve representatives from the NHS, councils and the private sector to work collaboratively to raise awareness of the health benefits of art, culture and creativity. The objectives of our project are to identify and share learning about the key elements of a successful Creative Health Board through collaborative research with community assets that: Demonstrates how art, culture and creative activities can be made more accessible for people at most at risk of poor health. Tests new approaches to funding, delivering, and measuring the impact of art, culture and creative activities provided by community assets. Builds the skills and confidence of community assets to carry out their own research and use evidence and digital technology to improve how they work. Develops new tools and guidance, including a Creative Health Handbook, so that art, culture and creative activities can become a key part of health and care services across the UK. Our project will be delivered by a team of leading community assets, academics, and representatives of health and care services. Together, we have extensive experience of delivering art, culture and creative activities in communities and undertaking research with people with lived experience of ill-health. Our goal is, by the end of the project, to have established six new Creative Health Boards across the UK. We will share our learning widely so that in the future, arts, culture and creativity can be more easily accessed by people wherever they live. Our project will have the following impacts: Health and care services will know about Creative Health Boards and what makes them effective. This will help them to prevent and tackle ill-health in communities where the risks are greatest. Community assets will be able to use the Creative Health Board model to work more closely and effectively with health and care services. They will also develop new knowledge and skills to carry-out their own research and to use evidence and digital technology to improve their work. Finally, they will have access to better funding models that can help them grow and develop the activities they offer. Individuals and communities at risk of or experiencing poor health will benefit from having a wider and more accessible range of art, culture and creative activities provided by community assets. In the long-term this will lead to better health and wellbeing for everyone involved.

This 44-month project will establish "LPIP Strategic Co-ordination Hub - What Works Centre for Place" as the Local Policy Innovation Partnership (LPIP) Strategic Co-ordination Hub. This will involve bringing together a network of people/organisations who have successfully delivered on place partnerships, engagement, impact, and translational research. The Hub is a national consortium, led by the University of Birmingham, convening stakeholders across the research and policy ecosystem. It is concerned with drawing together understanding of local challenges, and formulating solutions, across the UK through an innovative and effective service-driven approach to place-based policy making and public service delivery. It is designed to lead to a step-change in the quality and impact of the evidence created by universities and their local place partners. Our approach is based on extending and accelerating learning UK-wide from the successful and highly regarded place-based West Midlands Regional Economic Development Institute (WMREDI) partnership. The delivery team will be led by a leadership team, comprising staff from the University of Birmingham, the University of the West of England and Inner Circle Consulting (non-academic Co-Investigator) and a wider network team of 13 delivery partners (a mix of academics and non-academics from different geographical areas and with contrasting thematic specialisms) with a track record of rigorous high-quality engaged research relevant to local policy and practice. The Hub will work with local LPIPs and partnership communities in their places, embedding co-design and co-production. It will develop a programme of capacity-building activities looking at the thematic challenges places face and what works in place partnerships. It will respond to the needs of LPIPs and government. An Advisory Board made up of government and the wider place ecosystem partners and research assets will champion and guide the delivery of the Hive and the broader LPIP programme, as well as peer reviewing applications for funding from the Hub. The Hub will: - Tackle the gap in linking the 'local' with the 'national' in policy development by linking with policy makers at different geographical scales and across policy domains. - Model and scale up innovative and effective practice and deepen the collective knowledge base, so cultivating common purpose and collective intelligence in meeting the needs of places in all parts of the UK. - Act as a front door to national policy stakeholders - Use a 'service' mindset, which starts from the needs of users and designs products and services with their active involvement. - Use a careful balance of intellectual ambition (curiosity to understand what works) with engagement expertise to create the conditions for purposeful partnership working across different constituencies, including LPIP teams, policy makers, researchers, and citizens. - Provide training, secondment and learning opportunities. - Assess the transferability of methods and findings across the LPIP network (and beyond). The Hub will be successful if it has helped shape and grow a thriving place ecosystem that is: - addressing the challenge of making local places 'successful'; and where - government (nationally and sub-nationally) is working with the Hub to share data and enhance policy approaches to take account of place needs; and - UKRI and stakeholders see the LPIP programme pathway as an effective way of expanding place-based activities and programmes.

The aim of this place based impact acceleration account (PBIAA) is to support the translation of University research in medical technologies into new clinical products and services. There is a vibrant Medical Technology (MedTech) business cluster in the Yorkshire region, with over 200 companies employing more than 16,000 people, mostly in high value technical roles. The Universities of Leeds and Sheffield have strong track records in engineering and physical sciences research related to MedTech, particularly in areas that mirror the local business strengths (e.g. orthopaedics, dental, implantable devices and surgical technologies). While there is clear synergy between University research strengths and the business prominence in the region, there is currently a gap in the innovation funding pathway that is preventing technology innovations developed at the region's universities from being adopted by local companies. The aim of this PBIAA is to provide support to bridge this gap and build the connections between the academic, industrial and clinical assets in the region that will help grow the regional economy. It is particularly timely because the MedTech sector is transforming and there is increasing integration of new technologies into products and services. There are growing numbers of high-growth, high-innovation MedTech companies in the region with an absorptive capacity to benefit from this PBIAA, but we will also proactively engage with established companies that need to adopt new innovations to address the changing markets. We have worked with civic partners including the West Yorkshire Combined Authority and South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority, NHS Trusts through the Leeds and Sheffield Biomedical Research Centres, local industry, investors and innovation support organisations to develop this proposal and shape the activities to most effectively enable impact to be realised from the region's engineering and physical sciences research base. Commercialisation of innovations in the MedTech sector is challenging due to the regulatory barriers for products intended for use in humans, with evidence from extensive pre-clinical testing required to demonstrate the safety and efficacy. The PBIAA will fund Impact Projects that aim to generate evidence to derisk a technology, both to prove the technical concept is effective and to demonstrate that it is a commercially attractive proposition. A stage-gated approach will be used to encourage higher risk in the early stages and fast failure. These projects will act as exemplars to encourage further business engagement and outcomes will form a portfolio of evidence to inform future activities. The PBIAA will also support activities to build the regional innovation environment. These include a suite of training activities and events that raise understanding of technical advances and translational processes in the MedTech sector, and act to bring together academic, clinical and industrial partners to help build a lasting innovation community. The PBIAA will support events to identify clinical needs, two-way secondments, as well as public and patient engagement activities that aim to improve understanding of needs across the diverse regional population. A dedicated collaboration fund will be used to support impact activities at universities across the region, nurturing the wider regional strengths in this sector, and draw on wider collaborations that utilise the full strengths of the UK research base. The PBIAA will provide regional industry with a vital connection to state-of-the-art research, enabling a sustainable regional research-derived product development pipeline. It will help drive regional economic growth, with new innovations being adopted by regional industry, creating high value jobs and unlocking private sector investment in R&D, supporting a £3bn/year industry beyond 2035.

Developing new health technologies is complicated and often fails to lead to improved patient care. Successfully taking an idea through the necessary research studies and developing it to the point of use in the NHS requires many different areas of expertise. These include; understanding patients' and health professionals' needs, medical and healthcare environments, engineering and digital technologies, design, manufacturing, legal and ethical regulation, business development, how to obtain funding, and many other topics (in our application we refer to these areas the "Innovation Curriculum"). Our Hub covers a region of 1.4 million people in a region that is affected by high levels of disease and health inequalities. Our team includes all regional NHS organisations including GPs, adult and children's hospitals, mental health services and the recently introduced South Yorkshire "Integrated Care System", hundreds of researchers from the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University, many large and small companies, and patient and public groups. These partners between them have all the necessary expertise and experience in developing new Digital Health technologies to the point of use in the NHS. We will help researchers develop Digital Health technologies by training them in all aspects of the Innovation Curriculum, and by supporting them to work together with the NHS and patients on real ideas and projects. We will hold Citizen's Juries to understand the public and patients' views of Digital Health and to help design our research. We will produce sixty hours of training in Digital Health for researchers, clinicians, patients and the public, freely available and accredited through our partnership with YouTube's authoritative health content programme. We will hold regular "Calls for Ideas" where we support project teams and train them in Digital Health, providing the most promising ideas with initial project funding to help take these towards potential commercialisation.

Buildings and infrastructure are responsible for over 30% of the UK's carbon emissions, produce over 60% of the UK's waste, and consume approximately 50% of all extracted materials globally. Radical change is urgently required to achieve a sustainable construction sector. The circular economy (CE) is a well-recognised opportunity to turn waste into resources while reducing carbon emissions. CE aims to keep materials at the highest value possible, via a hierarchy of strategies, e.g. first prioritising extending the lifetime of buildings, then reusing building elements directly in-situ or on another site, then remanufacturing elements, and finally recycling material to conserve resources and avoid disposal. However, CE is still far from typical construction practice. Action to date has largely focused on one-off case studies of individual buildings, or recycling targets leading to wasteful downcycling, and lacks the national-scale, systems-level impact that is so desperately needed. BuildZero's vision is one of a building stock that delivers the UK's space requirements but no longer relies on extraction of new resources, by leveraging the CE to meet materials needs, and eliminating both waste and carbon emissions from material extraction and production. Using this highly ambitious end goal as a springboard, we will explore CE solutions across multiple scales, identified, co-created and co-delivered with our highly engaged industrial consortium, assess the extent to which this vision is achievable nationally, regionally and in relation to individual buildings, and determine the conditions in which the BuildZero vision leads to favourable social, environmental, and economic outcomes. This new knowledge base will provide a platform to enable these solutions to be translated into practice at scale, catalysing regional and national policy to stimulate real change. To achieve this, we will develop an interdisciplinary, multi-scale systems model of buildings and resources flows, focused around four themes: Theme 1: How does the baseline state of the system, including the interplay between societal attitudes, current materials/buildings and legislation constrain moves towards a co-created vision? Theme 2: How far can solutions that make the best use of space take us towards this vision? Theme 3: How far can making the best use of materials, including waste resources, take us? Theme 4: How can our future needs & potential solutions combine to achieve a BuildZero future? To tackle these research challenges we will use methods from industrial ecology, to understand material stocks and flows; from architecture, structural engineering, and materials science, to understand the technical potential of CE solutions; from social sciences, to understand social attitudes and trade-offs; and from economics, to understand potential CE business models. As well as conducting novel research in each underpinning area, we will commit significant resources to working with stakeholders to synthesise findings on what a CE for buildings looks like, by creating interactive foresight/backcasting tools, co-creating future scenarios and identifying the actions needed to catalyse change. Demonstrator projects will apply research to specific contexts, generating early impact. We will build a fundamental understanding of how and when to implement CE strategies, investigating economic viability, social inclusivity, and zero-carbon compatibility, considering these across multiple geographical and policy scales. Our programme of research will culminate in the identification of pathways to achieve the BuildZero vision over different time frames, and a co-created 10 year research roadmap that outlines the remaining work required to deliver a BuildZero future.