The Sir Jules Thorn Charitable Trust: Innovation and Improvement in Health & Care

Overview

Purpose of the programme

The Trust is seeking to support innovative models of health and care for which there is robust evidence demonstrating both the effectiveness of the model and that it is ready to be implemented at a larger scale. Projects could include, for example:

• scaling-up an intervention which has already been trialled in your organisation’s clinical or healthcare setting and has been shown to deliver positive real-world outcomes
• adaptation and implementation of a model which has been shown to be effective in other countries but has not previously been applied in the UK
• adaptation and implementation of an innovative model which has previously been shown to be effective in a different setting or for different groups of beneficiaries.

What the Trust will fund

The Trust will support the up-front investment necessary to roll out or scale up the model, and will therefore consider applications to support:

• infrastructure funding for specific facilities or equipment, where these are necessary to support innovation or improvement in practice
• project costs necessary to roll out or scale up new, improved practice, including staff, IT or consumables costs. This can include new staff recruited to deliver the project. Further information regarding eligible staff costs is provided in a later section of this guidance.

The Trust recognises that delivering a project will make some demands on the organisation’s core services (such as space, IT, or other resources). Budgets may therefore include a reasonable contribution to overheads. Organisations should not seek to recover overheads by including fractional salary contributions for staff who are not making a substantial contribution to the project.

Any funding from the Trust must be spent down in the two years from the grant agreement date. The applicant will need to demonstrate how the new model will be sustained once any investment supported by the Trust has been completed.

Funding Level

In previous years, the value of individual awards to support innovation and improvements in care has typically been in the range of £150,000 - £500,000. It is unlikely that the Trust will support a project under £100,000.

The Trust will not consider applications from organisations that have received an award of capital funding from the Trust within the previous two years (from the date of the award). This includes NHS organisations and Universities with separate, dedicated charities. For example, an NHS charity will not be eligible if their NHS Trust has received an award within the previous two years, or vice versa.

Eligibility

The programme is open to registered and exempt charities in the UK and to NHS organisations. The applicant’s primary activities must focus on the delivery and improvement of health and care.

Applicant organisations must have an annual income of at least £10 million (as recorded in their most recent audited financial statements).

The Trust recognises that many excellent services in health and care are delivered by organisations whose income falls below this threshold but is also very conscious of the level of work and resources required to prepare an application. The experience of previous funding rounds has shown that – whatever their other strengths – smaller organisations are less likely to have the reach and capacity to deliver the type of scalable and sustainable change that the Trust is seeking to fund.

Where an application involves a number of partners, the income threshold of £10m will apply to the combined annual income of the partners. Please refer to the later section on Partnerships for further guidance.

If the applicant (or lead applicant of a partnership) is a charity, the organisation must have been registered with the Charity Commission (or equivalent in other parts of the UK) for a minimum of five years, assessed from the deadline for submission of initial Expressions of Interest. An exempt charity must have existed for at least five years with that status.

Organisations cannot apply if they have received a capital award from the Trust within the last two years (assessed against the date of the previous award letter). Please contact the Trust if you are unsure if your charity, university or NHS Trust has recently received funding.

Organisations may only submit one application to the Trust’s capital programmes each funding round. Universities and NHS organisations, which are considering prospective projects for both the Innovation and Improvement in Health and Care Fund and the Trust’s Research Infrastructure Fund, will need to coordinate the selection process to decide which one should be submitted. It is recommended that applicants work with their fundraising/development office to organise their application. Only the first application submitted will be considered if multiple applications from a single organisation are received.

Information about the Trust’s recent capital funding to support improvements in health and care can be found in the Previous Awards section of their website.