Engagement with health and social practitioners, managers, commissioners and policy makers: Our research involves clinicians and health professionals, not just as research participants but also as co-applicants on bids, collaborators on studies and expert advisors supporting and guiding our research. This degree of involvement enables project outcomes to be more easily adopted into practice.
Public engagement and involvement of service users and carers: The public, patients and service users have been central in guiding our research activity. We have developed a number of strategies to ensure our research is linked to user priorities, outcomes that can be influenced and implemented by users, and findings that can be understood within the public domain. Where possible, users, from a broad range of organisations (e.g. existing patient groups, third sector organisations, pensioner groups), are co-applicants in our bids, members of steering groups or involved in the research through data collection, analysis, contributing to reports, papers and dissemination through conference presentations or by cascading information through peer organisations.
Engagement with industry: We have conducted product development projects with Novozymes, AiCuris, Novartis and Sanofi on novel drugs and vaccines, with h Ultrasis (UK) to develop novel online platforms for delivery of psychological therapies and TESAN (Italy) to develop telecare for people with multiple long-term conditions.
Engagement to develop innovative health and social care technologies: Research on prehospital clinical quality indicators for ambulance services led to their adoption into NHS national regulatory frameworks . Research exploring prevention and personalisation for older people has underpinned central and local government actions around prevention of disability and promotion of well-being. Our research has affected UK influenza vaccination policy.
Engagement with multidisciplinary internal and external academic and health partnerships: A University-wide Research Investment Fund (£500k pa) and smaller internal college grants are helping to build capacity and research experience. These fund multidisciplinary studies across the three Colleges involving industry or statutory bodies (e.g. clinical and operational staff).