Building a GW4 Clinical Academic Training Community

Background

By creating a vibrant cohort of young talented clinical academics across GW4 we will significantly enhance our collective abilities to translate our basic biomedical and population health research into an impact on patient care. We will become increasingly attractive as a UK region for clinical academic training, placing ourselves in a powerful position to bid for major research funding for clinical academic training programmes and stand-alone clinical training fellowships, through the major funders.

The GW4 partners can boast a number of internationally-leading research challenge areas which underpin a compelling case to build a coordinated GW4 Clinical Academic Training programme. These challenge areas include cancer, cardiovascular science, infection and immunity and many more.

These challenge areas will provide a broad range of opportunities to clinical trainees, who will benefit from a comprehensive pan-GW4 clinical training programme that offers outstanding mentorship, and follow-through support towards intermediate and senior clinical fellowships, and then academic clinical lectureships.

Project summary

The funds from this Initiator award 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.

The community 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.