Foreword Making an impact This review of our impact between April 2019 to 31 March 2020 was mostly business as usual, where we increased the breadth and depth of our collaborations with our regional health and care partners, academia, citizens and industry to deliver some major successes in terms of patient and investment impact. Highlights of the year included our work on the national atrial fibrillation programme, in which we helped to reduce the number of avoidable strokes in our region. On other national programmes, we supported some of the regions most vulnerable mental health patients by working to integrate their care and we helped to reduce the number of hospital readmissions occurring through medication errors. Elsewhere, we are delighted with the progress of Gut Reaction, the Health Data Research Hub for Inflammatory Bowel Disease, which we deliver in partnership with 17 organisations and is led by Cambridge University Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, which hosts the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) BioResource. We have made progress to build an innovative cloud-based research environment that the team hopes will transform the understanding of inflammatory bowel disease. Our Patient Safety Collaborative also made significant progress, supporting two major initiatives in maternity and neonatology, developing their work in care homes and helping our local hospitals to improve the safety of emergency laparotomy, a major invasive surgical procedure. And we have significantly increased the guidance we provide to our regions innovators in health and care, introducing our first scale-up academy and a wider collaborative programme called MedTechBOOST. We have also been thrilled to see the progress of innovators we have built longer-term partnerships with, including Little Journey, Just One Norfolk and Medic Bleep. We hope that you will enjoy reading about all these success stories and more, in this review. But the advent of the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything. Our NHS colleagues responded with remarkable speed, reconfiguring hospitals in record time to create dedicated capacity and facilitating primary care colleagues to continue their work through the wholesale adoption of remote consultation technologies. At Eastern AHSN, we repositioned our work in March to provide some direct support to the frontline and to our regional teams managing the crisis. Three months on, though, the health and care sector is facing a difficult legacy. This includes a backlog of procedures ranging from elective surgery to cancer treatment and the question of how we respond to the crisis that overtook many of our care homes. As the first wave of the virus starts to subside, we have the opportunity to reflect on the changes made to our health and care service and consider those we should continue to drive forward and those which may not have worked so well. Our plans for the coming year will be responsive to the needs of our partners and there is now a real opportunity to showcase the amazing range of innovators, start-ups and industries working across the East of England with the potential to relieve the extraordinarily challenging period now facing us. At Eastern AHSN, our focus for the coming year will be to signpost our NHS health and care partners to the most relevant of these new ideas while providing practical support, where we are able, to some of the most pressing issues facing staff and patients. Piers and Elisabeth Piers Ricketts Elisabeth Buggins Chief Executive Chair