A major issue in public service delivery is supporting well-evidenced projects, programmes and services which work and are effective to be replicated at pace and scale. For instance, there is a lot of focus on and incentives for innovation in public service delivery, but arguably less incentive for successfully replicating and scaling models of service delivery that have been evidenced to work.

Therefore, we are really pleased to be supporting the Health Foundation’s exploring social franchising and licencing programme. This programme aims to explore whether social franchising and licencing might support the effective spread and scale of well evidenced interventions in the NHS. As such the programme offers an exciting opportunity to investigate the potential benefits of an innovative approach to scale and spread.

Alongside our partners, the Innovation Unit, we’ve been working closely with the Health Foundation to develop a flexible yet robust approach to evaluating the programme. The Health Foundation’s Sarah Henderson explores the challenges of evaluating an “ever-changing experiment”, and the approaches we’ve developed collaboratively to overcome these challenges in this article.

You can download September's Cordis Pulse below.