The project aims to promote awareness and transfer of techniques for healthcare modelling to the user community, which includes health and social care professionals in Local Authorities, PCTs, and hospital trusts including clinicians and nurses; SMEs involved in healthcare management consultancy and/or software development. In addition, the project will foster collaboration between HEIs and the user community by identifying unfulfilled user needs.

Specifically, the project has the following objectives:

• To establish a substantial knowledge base on ICT applicable to the planning and management of health and social care systems throughout the WestFocus participating HEIs
• To identify transferable knowledge for improving the planning and management of health and social care system among WestFocus HEIs
• To structure knowledge for use by potential users (such as health and social care purchasers and providers, SMEs in health care consultancy and IT firms)
• To disseminate knowledge to the user community, generate feed-backs and identify unfulfilled user needs
• To collaborate with health care IT and a management consultancy firm to exploit research output.

We believe that by exchanging academic knowledge and industrial experience, valuable outcomes can be gained which can succeed in effective and efficient health and social care management.

We began by holding two events in mid-2006 where academics, health and social care professionals and health industry delegates were able to exchange knowledge and experience. We are now actively engaged with a number of technology transfer networks working in the same area including notably MASHnet (Modelling and Simulation in Healthcare) and RIGHT (Research Into Global Healthcare Tools).