◄Previous: 5 Is innovation a good thing?

# Conclusion

Innovation in health and social care aims to provide solutions to problems in order to benefit society. However, historical examples demonstrate that theories about what is good or what doesn’t work changes over time. For example, 20 years from now it’s possible that we might view some of the health and social innovations that are implemented today as either damaging or ineffective.

Innovation can be highly valuable for some people but highly problematic for others. For example, the internet has been highly innovative for millions of people and is being harnessed to transform the health and wellbeing of many, but at the same time, it has also generated new forms of criminality and social anxiety.

It is important, therefore, to be careful when claiming that all innovation is good. The beneficial impact of health and social care innovation needs to be backed up by robust research evidence to avoid both inefficiency and repeating the mistakes of the past.

This OpenLearn course is an adapted extract from the Open University course K102 Introducing health and social care.

◄Contents►Next: References

OpenLearn - Innovation in health and social care: social and historical
Except for third party materials and otherwise, this content is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 Licence, full copyright detail can be found in the acknowledgements section. Please see full copyright statement for details.