NIHR CRN Research Delivery Staff Learning Community: Engaging with your local NHS Community Update
Date: 30 June 2020
It has been widely recognised that since the outbreak of COVID-19, the importance of research is becoming more visible and immediate to NHS organisations by the day. With all the activity delivering COVID-19 priority research it remains important that we continue to share learnings and experiences with each other at this time of rapid change. We know that for many of you just getting through the day is the focus. So we want to make it as easy as possible to share your experience so that we can all also understand the changing attitudes to research in NHS care and the opportunities and challenges of the environment you are working in. This is so that we can all influence the future for research and those who work in it as a vital component in best patient care.
One of the tools the NIHR CRN’s NHS Engagement Team has developed to help with this is a temporary section dedicated to COVID-19 on the Research Delivery Staff Learning Community: ‘Engaging with your local NHS’ . This is to help ensure research delivery staff have the opportunity to discuss and share their experiences of delivering priority research in their NHS care organisations. By creating a shared hub we hope to encourage people to tell others about their experiences through personal blogs or via the forum. In this way we all learn from each other about the rapid changes in the environment for delivering research given its higher profile in the response to COVID-19.
The COVID-19 subsection also signposts you to a range of key resources to help keep you informed with the latest research advances, including a full updated list of the urgent public health studies, links to the key NIHR online learning courses and important updates relating to the pandemic.
The community is hosted on the NIHR Learn platform, which is open to all with either an NHS or NIHR email address. It’s quick to register too, and it enables us all to learn from each other however experienced or inexperienced we might be in the roles we currently have. The platform also gives access to more formal accredited learning programmes for those wanting them.
We also want to continuously improve what we do so that it is relevant to people like you so do please consider being part of a focus group to help us make this platform work for people in roles like yours. If you are interested, we would love to hear from you, so do contact Lucy for more information. Drop her an email in the first instance (lucy.gallagher@nihr.ac.uk) and she will get back to you.