Six stories this week — from NHS policy to an Irish artist redesigning the end of life, and why digital health needs to pay more attention to it's users.

After years based in Wakefield, a few weeks ago Health Innovation Yorkshire & Humber has moved into a new home at the National Health Innovation Campus in Huddersfield.

For those who don't know, this is the team running the West Yorkshire Health Tech Cluster. They support companies at every stage , helping to get their products into the NHS.

They also run programmes like Propel, currently backed by £4.5 million from the West Yorkshire Mayor's Investment Zone. This move of course makes total sense and put them at the heart of a new centre of excellence in health innovation.

Next, the government published its renewed Women's Health Strategy last week. It does come with some money attached — about £5 million of new, however there's lots of commentary about there about it not being enough. One major thing to consider is that men’s health recently received significantly more new funding.

Every region in England gets a specialist women's health hub. There's new investment in menstrual education for girls. And reforms are promised to cut waiting lists for conditions including endometriosis and fibroids.

What is good is that £1.5 million of this is for a FemTech challenge fund, which will back innovation in women's healthtech. So for health tech founders in this space, the FemTech fund is the one to watch.

The World Health Organisation in Europe has just published the first comprehensive picture of AI use in healthcare across all 27 EU member states.

The scale of uptake is incredible. Nearly three quarters of EU countries are already using AI-assisted diagnostics and 63% are deploying chatbots for patient engagement.

Almost half have created dedicated AI and data science roles within their health systems, BUT safeguards are not keeping pace.

Regulation, governance, and workforce readiness are lagging well behind deployment.

The WHO is calling on governments to urgently prioritise training, transparency, and shared standards. Fast adoption without a safety framework is how you build problems at scale.

That's the news. Now the creative side — and it's a good one

Irish artist John Conway has built a mobile printing press designed to be wheeled directly to a patient's bedside. Patients choose word blocks and compose phrases, then press them on to paper.

The trolley has been designed beautifully — a pastel pink frame, with softblue side panels which gives it a hyper accessible feel and a joyful presence on the ward.

Prints are gifted to families, framed for the ward archive, or placed in the hospital's solace rooms when a patient has died.

Dezeen covered this earlier in April. It's a quiet, piece of design that's perfect for it's context and will really make a difference to people living in palliative care.

In agency news, FCB Health New York — one of the world's most awarded agencies has rebranded to Olixir New York — launched off the back of the Omnicom and Interpublic Group merger.

The name fuses the word elixir — a liquid taken for medicinal effect — with the Omnicom O at the front to make Olixir

President Linda Bennett and CCO Kathleen Nanda are staying on to lead the agency. As one of the most established names in health advertising starting over with a new identity and the resources of a much bigger network behind it is an exciting prospect.

Now for the last one.

A piece published in Biometric Update this April makes a challenge to the health tech sector. Despite billions being spent on digital health systems, many remain underused and distrusted. Not because of technical failure — but because they were designed without the people expected to use them.

The piece argues that co-design and human-centred approaches are not optional extras. They are the difference between a system that gets adopted and one that gathers dust. And I completely agree!

Not only that, but the user experience from a technical AND design perspective is incredibly important. SO many systems look bland and uninspiring — a far cry from a joy to use. This damages potential adoption and can actually REDUCE trust.

It's a challenge this sector keeps needing to hear, particularly in a quarter when digital health has raised four billion dollars.

The design process and quality of output matters just as much as the technical achievement.

That's my six stories for this week. Share with someone who might need it. And if you've got anything you think is worth talking about, just let me know.

I've been Chris and this was The Wake Up.