The Northern Health Futures (NortHFutures) Hub aims to enhance health and wellbeing across the North East and North Cumbria region of the UK.
The hub facilitates responsible research and innovation in healthcare technologies (health-tech), supported by inclusive digital skills sharing, training, and making connections.
We take a people-centred approach and are committed to humanising health-tech by championing equity, participation, and investment across the region.
Our goal is to establish NortHFutures as a pioneering ecosystem working across job sectors that empowers people to engage and lead in digital health and health-tech initiatives. We practice participant-led user research and evaluation of tools and resources to strive for the design of useable and useful technologies and services.
We aim to create an inclusive environment where everyone, from health and social care professionals and industry leaders to community organisations, advocacy groups and academic researchers, can come together to collaborate, innovate and share insights and experience.
50+ core partners across industry, health & care, public & voluntary sectors
£4.17m programme
“Our aspiration is that the Hub will deliver a supportive and diverse community infrastructure that will stimulate social, economic and cultural growth, and will promote wellbeing for all.” — Abigail Durrant & Naeem Soomro, Directors of NortHFutures
Our Activities
We aim to address health and social inequalities in the North East and North Cumbria through inclusive digital skills training and sharing, responsible health-tech design and development, networking and entrepreneurship.
We will:
Connect stakeholders in health-tech research and innovation;
Facilitate digital skills sharing to train future leaders;
Fund scoping research and new cross-sector collaborations;
Lead with human-centred approaches to champion the design of usable and useful tools and resources.
The UK has an urgent need for new health data scientists – it’s a rapidly expanding field with the recognised potential to transform the future of health and care for all, and health data science should serve and reflect the needs of the entire UK population.
NortHFutures is supporting HDR
Join us at the NortHFutures Digital Health Symposium 2024!
Sign up here
We are bringing together digital health, data and technology experts from across NENC and the UK for a day of knowledge exchange, discussion and learning on the digital future of healthcare.
The Symposium is for people working in
People are at the heart of healthcare, possessing invaluable expertise in how the services they use work. By bringing their lived experience to the forefront of research and development, we ensure that new healthcare technologies are designed for the people who will use them.