Strategic health authorities and their partners are being invited to bid in the second round of the Department of Health (DH) Social Enterprise Investment Fund.

Kerry McQuade, Project Manager at the North East Strategic Health Authority, said: "This funding provides an exciting chance for the North East Strategic Health Authority and third sector partners to work together with the aim of improving health and wellbeing, and I am very much looking forward to talking to people about their ideas."

Strategic health authorities will be invited to bid for up to £100k revenue each (from the existing Social Enterprise Fund) to support the commissioning of innovative cross-sector social enterprise solutions.

Funding from the new 'Innovation for life Challenge Fund' for 2008/9 could be used to support local boroughs to develop social enterprise solutions to health and well-being issues and to provide cross-sector solutions to local problems, for instance the health and housing sectors working together.

Care Services Minister Ivan Lewis said: "The Innovation for Life Challenge Fund is testimony to our confidence in social enterprise as part of the solution to commissioning world class health and social care services.

"We hope that this will challenge commissioners to find solutions through social enterprises to longstanding problems that have the potential to lead to real social change and improvement in health and well being.

"Increasingly, we are seeing social enterprises delivering the innovative and personalised services that people rightly expect. That is why we have set up this new scheme as part of the £100 million Social Enterprise Investment Fund."

Local partners, under the stewardship of the SHAs would be expected to provide further funding equivalent to 25 per cent of their bid to the Innovation for Life Challenge Fund.

The Social Enterprise Investment Fund supports the development of social enterprises in health and social care such as women's refuges, migraine clinics and exercise programmes for the elderly, which take account of and address the needs of a wide range of patients and services users, particularly the most vulnerable and excluded.

Social enterprises are businesses, which reinvest their profits back into the organisation or into the local community, promoting independence, well-being and social inclusion and helping to improve people's quality of life.