Health Innovation and Education Cluster (HIEC)

The Health Innovation and Education Cluster (HIEC) for the North East of England aims to accelerate progress in innovation and education across the North East in order to drive up the quality of health care for the benefit of patients. The HIEC will achieve this by wide involvement of partner organisations within the broad health and social care environment and beyond.

HIECs were proposed by the Government’s Next Stage Review for the NHS. The Department of Health ran a HIEC competition. The North East bid  was prepared by a Sponsor Group and supported cross sector by NHS, HEIs, Industry, Local Government and Third Sector and was submitted October 2009. 

The bid was formally approved in January 2010 and the HIEC commenced activities in April 2010.