STRENGTHENING RESEARCH

Within Hampshire Hospitals Nhs Foundation Trust

INTERVIEWEES:

NATASHA CHIGBO, Head of Research & Development, Hampshire Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust (HHFT)

EMMA LEVELL, Research Nurse, HHFT

DR LARA ALLOWAY, Chief Medical Officer said: “This is an exciting time for Hampshire Hospitals, our staff and our local population, as we work towards delivering our Modernising our Hospitals and Health services programme (MOHHS). Research is a core theme in our Trust and clinical strategies, as a key enabler for delivering outstanding care to our patients, today and tomorrow. Our patients’ and staffs’ impressive involvement in research throughout the COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us of the value of clinical research, helping us understand diagnosis, treatment and prevention of COVID-19. This strategy uses our experience as a basis to further develop the scope of the research we can offer in the Trust.

We aim to empower, train and support our staff to be engaged in research and collaborate with our partners to achieve this. We want to increase our capacity to offer our patients access to research, across all services and truly embed a research culture.”

In 2022, we were asked to develop a new strategy to sit alongside the overarching clinical strategy at HHFT. The research team here is quite small, but we want to grow, and we needed to show how we we're going to advance and develop a strong research culture within the trust.

We hope that our four key strategy themes will help us to achieve this:

PATIENTS, PUBLIC & STAFF

We hope to embed research among all the people that we work with, and for, at HHFT. We are developing a network of Public Research Ambassadors who will help us reach out to the communities we serve and our staff, alongside promoting opportunities for people to get involved in research (patients, public and staff) across multiple platforms and creating a network of Research Link Champions who can help us disseminate research information to all.

Sustainable Growth

We want to ensure that we can build on what we are good at and be truly innovative in our approach to research. This means increasing our capacity to host commercial trials and sponsoring trials too. We will explore areas that are already a natural fit for us, with the expertise we have, and assist our clinicians to make grant applications that will support our work and strategy goals.

Workforce And Infrastructure

Growing our research workforce also means that we need to have the facilities in place to be able to support them. We’ve been working alongside the teams planning the new hospital in Hampshire to ensure that purposebuilt research facilities are embedded within the development. We also hope to develop clinical and academic pathways to build the depth and breadth of research among clinicians from all backgrounds and specialities.

Collaboration And Partnership

Working alongside others is an important part of growing our research capabilities and expanding who we can reach with our research opportunities. We already host student nurses, physiotherapists and dietitians from the University of Winchester so that we can embed research within their training and grow our partnerships with organisations, but we are also expanding the ways we can do this with fellow research organisations, companies and services.

Read on to discover how one of these partnerships, the PAIR1 Study, is already producing results for prostate cancer diagnosis.