National Centre for Child Health Technology
Tuesday 8 August 2023
Sheffield Children’s is leading the amazing new development based at the Sheffield Olympic Legacy Park, the National Centre for Child Health Technology. The centre be a place to carry out world-leading research, inspire, innovate and build new technologies to solve the biggest challenges in children’s healthcare.
The Centre will bring together children, healthcare professionals, inventors, businesses, academics and engineers under the same roof. It will have state of the art facilities for manufacturing, digital and device development, and twill provide space to deliver some Sheffield Children’s clinical care. The NCCHT will be more than a building, it will bring together a community of innovators across the country and the world to spark a culture of innovation and provide exciting opportunities to develop new technology that will improve healthcare across Sheffield and beyond.
In February this year, we were excited to announce that £6m from South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority and £2m from our Children’s Hospital Charity provided the final funding, totalling £22m, to start development for the centre. Since then, colleagues across Sheffield Children’s and our partners have been busy putting together plans to begin building.
What are child health technologies?
New technologies such as virtual and augmented reality, artificial intelligence, robotics and virtual care are changing our lives. Together, we will use them to change how we care for children. The Centre will be a place to innovate, design, create, test and put into practice these and other child health technologies.
What next?
Prof Paul Dimitri, Professor of Child Health, Director of Technology and Innovation at Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust, and Clinical Director of NIHR CYP MedTech, recently shared some updates about the development and reflected that the Centre will be “a place to carry out world-leading research, inspire, innovate and build new technologies to solve the biggest challenges in children’s healthcare”.
Sheffield Children’s and partners have advanced designs of the building with the aim of starting construction early in 2024, aiming to open the Centre in summer 2025.
The NCCHT has received funding from a combination of the UK Government Levelling up Fund, the South Yorkshire Mayoral Combined Authority and The Children’s Hospital Charity alongside a contribution from the Trust’s own capital resources. The future of the centre will continue to be funded outside of NHS funds and will be a combination of commercial and research space as well as NHS care provision.
You can find out more about the Children’s Hospital Charity fundraiser from their website by using the link below.
