The 5th ThaiHealth Inno Award incubates innovators to enhance the national health-promoting innovations

Thai Health Promotion Foundation (ThaiHealth) and its strategic network are together empowering new-generation innovators by organising the 5th  Thailand Inno Award for Health Promotion 2022 to develop and support creativity in the community of youngsters and to upgrade award-winning innovations that can be implemented in Thai society.

 

Aug 19, 2022 — ThaiHealth’s Acting Director of the Academics and Innovation Section, Dr Nuttapuan Supaka, spoke at the Innovation Camp to develop the potential of new innovators in health promotion innovations that the activity is part of the 5th  round of ThaiHealth Inno Award. Initiated in 2017, this round has marked the 2nd  year of conferring the Prime Minister’s Award for Health Promotion to the winning young innovators. Taking place at Maenam Ramada Plaza Hotel in Bangkok, the Prime Minister presided over the award ceremony to present the awards for the winning innovators.

The Innovation Camp is organised to support the development of knowledge and creativity power for new-generation innovators in their health promotion work with two target groups: general individuals or startups, and innovators from ThaiHealth’s network partners, with the main objective of implementing the innovations in real life.

 

The innovation contest is expected to bring about real-life implementation of the innovative approaches. Some of the examples are the application of roadside milestones made of rubber by the Department of Rural Roads instead of those made of concrete which is in line with the policy set by the Transport Ministry in 2020. Care Share Team from Chiang Mai Vocational College Volunteer Innovators serving the community of elderly and Lam Chang community enterprises from Chiang Mai led a project to further develop innovations to promote health (Booster Programme) to expand the work results to better meet health target groups.

In its capacity of the organiser of the contest, ThaiHealth does not only aim for award-winning innovations, but it also aims to create the next-gen innovators to promote health by the brains and the hands of both students and teachers, where their innovations can be expanded far and wide to meet the needs and the context of each community,” said Dr Natthaphan.

 

Not only aiming for award winning works. but is to create a seed of innovators to promote health that happened to both students and teachers which extends the work to be able to expand widely and meet the needs according to the context of the community" said Dr. Nutapan.

Director of Office of Content Creation from Thai Public Broadcasting Service (Thai PBS), Mr Somyot Kiataramkul, said that, in the era of VUCA World where volatility and uncertainty are the norm, Thai people’s behaviours toward health have changed for the better and for worse. This is the gap where innovations can fill in to help the health promotion work. The word “Health Promoting Innovation” can either be an invention or just a mere idea on the basis of the combination of creativity in the fields of natural science and social sciences resulting in innovative work that covers all four dimensions: physical, mental, intellectual, and social façades.

 

All in all, this innovation contest will help develop the new generation of youngsters who are the significant force of the country to promote health. These include teachers and counsellors who will play an important part in cultivating many generations of innovators and help them understand how to promote health starting from oneself, which later would develop into their communities, and their surrounding societies.

In my capacity as a representative of the organising committee of the Prime Minister’s Award for Health Promotion Innovation 2022, I am specially honoured to receive the Prime Minister’s favour as the national award. It is like handing over the country’s development to the hands of the youngsters thanks to their creative power. I would also like to extend my congratulations to all finalists of the contest, to both highschool and vocational school levels. I strongly wish they will bring their knowledge acquired from training sessions at the Innovation Camp to further develop their new innovations in order to promote better health and solve several health-related problems in the future,” said Mr Somyot.

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