SMAU Stockholm 2026 | Interview with Andreas Saxin, Karolinska University Hospital

At SMAU Stockholm 2026 we interviewed, Andreas Saxin, Nurse and Senior Innovation Leader, Karolinska University Hospital. He told us about introducing innovation in the hospital and what are the main challenges in the process: “So building innovations in a healthcare setting is in itself pretty hard. We need structures to help the nurses and those close to the patient come up with good ideas. We can’t add more to the nurses’ workload, so we need to find ways to help them come up with innovative thoughts and capture them without needing to add more workload to their already busy day. Some ways that we do this is we have an innovation board where they can come up with ideas. They can just write them down on a Post-it and put it up on the innovation board, and I, as innovation leader, can check the board every day when I come to work. When I have the time, I just pick up those ideas and follow them and take them through the idea management process that we have. And I work with them and make sure to update my colleagues on how the idea is going through that process. So we also need to show the innovators that their idea is going somewhere, that it doesn’t stop, and they need to know where the idea is going at every second it is in the process. So change is always scary. It is true for hospitals as well, as we create systems and routines to make sure our patients are safe. Those routines become the safety for the nurses as well, and now we are challenging those systems with change, and that is scary. But one way that we are trying to solve this is that when the innovative ideas come from the nurses themselves, they are a part of the change, and they are actually changing the structure of their own work. With that comes the need to understand the problem, and that is what we are trying to teach our nurses: to be questionable and to think about the problems when they occur”