Published: 27 June 2023
Two collaborations led by St George’s researchers aiming to foster research skills among health and care professionals have received funding from the NIHR.
Support for ten research career ‘incubators’ was announced earlier this month. Each will receive three years of support to develop academic research career capacity in disciplines where there is a national need, ranging from mental health social care to the pharmacy profession.
The NIHR Incubator programme was established in 2018 to encourage networking, training and career development support for health and care professionals. Incubators are virtual and the funding is used to bring together key stakeholders to identify and tackle barriers that exist to building research capacity in a sustainable and meaningful way.
There is a particular focus on attracting and supporting health and care professionals early in their careers into academic research. Each incubator is bespoke to the area, but they are generally managed across multiple sites and build communities via networking and training.
Community Rehabilitation
A new Community Rehabilitation Incubator will be led by Professor Lindsay Bearne, Professor of Physiotherapy and Rehabilitation in the St George’s Population Health Research Institute.
Personalised community rehabilitation (rehabilitation delivered outside acute hospital settings) improves health and wellbeing and can relieve pressures on other areas of the NHS. But the national research capability and capacity in the field is low, with few opportunities for rehabilitation professionals to advance research in the area. There are also differing levels of representation and engagement across the professional groups which make up the community.
The incubator aims to address this by bringing together clinicians, academics and community partners, alongside patients and carers, to build research capacity and delivery by creating a vibrant environment for training, mentoring and support across all aspects of research career development.
“The new incubator is an exciting opportunity for us to create a cohesive community of researchers in community rehabilitation and attract new colleagues to the field. We aim to attract those who may have been marginalised in research career opportunities in the past, and our efforts will be underpinned by co-design and participatory approaches.”
- Professor Lindsay Bearne -
Emergency Care
The existing Emergency Care Incubator successfully reapplied to the scheme for a second three-year term. Co-led by Professor Heather Jarman, Research Director for Nursing, Midwifery and Allied Health Professions at St George’s Hospital and Reader at St George’s Population Health Research Institute, the incubator has already grown a membership of 200 emergency care researchers from across professions.
It has also identified several barriers to academic development in emergency care, including regional discrepancies in access to training and research opportunities, and underrepresentation of people from minoritised backgrounds in the incubator membership and the field more broadly.
The incubator now plans to work with existing and new stakeholders to establish a national database of multi-professional researchers to be able to rapidly identify potential research sites. This will also allow identification of underserved regions and professional groups. It will also continue to develop training and mentorship opportunities for those professions that remain under-represented within the community, including allied health professionals, advanced clinical practitioners, research delivery staff, as well as those from minoritised ethnic backgrounds.
“We’ve made huge amounts of progress in the past three years in terms of creating a critical mass of emergency care researchers who can learn from and support each other. But we know there are gaps in terms of people from all professions and background being able to access this support and research opportunities more broadly, so it’s fantastic to have the opportunity to continue this important work.”
- Professor Heather Jarman -
Learn more about the research at St George’s Population Health Research Institute