NHS England: The Healthy New Towns Design Challenge

NHS England and its partners in the Healthy New Towns programme are looking for ideas for how housing developments and health and social care facilities can enable better health, well-being and independence for residents. In particular, the Seekers are interested in services, products, and facilities designs to be implemented at the Halton Lea Demonstrator Site.  

The Seekers are looking not only for new and creative ideas, but also for innovations in the built environment that have shown great success in other communities and geographies that can be implemented and demonstrated at Halton Lea.

The Healthy New Towns (HNT) programme emerged from the NHS Five Year Forward View in Autumn 2014 in recognition that new town developments and the regeneration of existing urban areas offered a unique opportunity to design modern health and care services from scratch, with fewer legacy constraints - integrating not only health and social care, but also other public services such as welfare, education and affordable housing. In addition, they offer opportunities to enhance health, well-being and independence through the built environment including through designing housing that enable more independent living, public realm and transport infrastructure that encourages exercise; and other interventions to encourage healthy eating, positive social interaction and economic opportunity. 

The programme was launched in July 2015 with three objectives:

• To develop new and more effective ways of shaping new towns, neighbourhoods and strong communities that promote health and wellbeing, prevent illness and keep people independent;
• To show what is possible when we radically rethink how health and care services could be delivered, freed from the legacy constraints (i.e. existing services) that operate in other areas; and
• To accomplish the first two objectives in a way that can be replicated elsewhere, making learning available to other national programmes as well as other local areas. 

More information can be found in the following links:

https://www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/innovation/healthy-new-towns/

https://www.england.nhs.uk/ourwork/innovation/healthy-new-towns/halton-lea-runcorn/

With this Design Challenge, the NHS England seeks to gather existing methods or generate new ideas on how to deliver health-promoting aspects of the built environment at a cost that meets the commercial pressures faced by homebuilders and developers whilst providing the health and socio-economic benefits for the community that are further described in the Challenge Details. The objective of the Seeker is to identify ideas that are suitable to be implemented and tested at the scale and in the context of the Halton Lea demonstration site. 

This is an Ideation Challenge, which has the following unique features:

• There is a guaranteed award.  The awards will be paid to the best submission(s) as solely determined by the Seeker. The total payout will be $20,000, with at least one award being no smaller than $5,000 and no award being smaller than $2,000. In addition to the monetary awards, the Seeker intends to publicly recognize the contribution of the winning Solvers to the HNT programme. 
• The Solvers are not required to transfer exclusive intellectual property rights to the Seeker.  Rather, by submitting a proposal, the Solver grants to the Seeker a royalty-free, perpetual, and non-exclusive license to use any information included in this proposal, including for promotional purposes.

Submissions to this Challenge must be received by 11:59 PM (US Eastern Time) on May 15, 2017. Late submissions will not be considered. 

After the Challenge deadline, the Seeker will complete the review process and make a decision with regards to the Winning Solution(s). All Solvers that submit a proposal will be notified on the status of their submissions; however, no detailed evaluation of individual submissions will be provided.