Building a Clinical Academic Training Community Across South West England and South Wales
University of Bristol: John Iredale (PI), Jeremy Tavare
Cardiff University: Paul Morgan
University of Exeter: Tamsin Ford
Background
Our long-term vision is to develop a positive, strong and sustainable health and biomedical research translation and impact culture by enhancing the quantity and quality of internationally-competitive clinical academics in the career pipeline across GW4 member organisations. As such, the research ‘community’ we propose will be far reaching but its impact is different to the usual research community supported by the GW4 Building Communities scheme.
In 2015 we secured an Initiator Award “Building a GW4 Clinical Academic Training Community” (GW4-IF3-010). The funds (<£3K) were deployed to bring together a group of academics and research support staff across the four GW4 institutions, to scope what the future of clinical academic training should look like for the partnership. This group concluded that we needed to focus on two key milestones: (1) To develop a bid to support a foundational cohort-based GW4-CAT training scheme; (2) To create a SouthWest England and South Wales Centre of Excellence (SWESW-CoE) in Clinical Academic Training.
We successfully delivered (1) through a £5.2M Wellcome Trust Award for a GW4 Clinical Academic Training (GW4-CAT) Programme supporting 25 highly talented medics, dentists or vets to undertake a PhD and develop a successful academic career by run through into an intermediate fellowship and clinical lectureship.
Project summary
Deliverable (2) was the focus of this Accelerator Award. The community used the funding to identify stakeholders (postgraduate clinicians in training, prospective trainees and lead clinical academics and managers delivering academic clinical training) and gather evidence from them via surveys and interviews to support the creation of a CoE.
The community is now working towards the creation of the SWESW-CoE, a virtual hub bringing together all clinical academic trainees across the region into a cohort that can receive timely advice, training and mentoring through spread of best practice. For them and the institutions, it will maximise the opportunity for future funding from Wellcome and non-Wellcome sources (e.g. MRC, CRUK, BHF etc) and will enhance international recruitment.
