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News & Events

New funding announced to support next generation of dementia researchers

NIHR has introduced £11.8 million of funding for promising early career researchers to pursue dementia research and to build up their number and skills across the NIHR family. Working in collaboration with Alzheimer’s Society, has announced new funding to strengthen capacity and capability in dementia health and care research across the NIHR Applied Research Collaborations (ARCs).  Read more

NIHR launches new publishing platform to expand its publicly available research information

NIHR has launched a new publishing platform that allows researchers to rapidly publish any research informationthey wish to share, supporting transparency, reproducibility and impact from publicly funded research. Read more

Upcoming call – developing innovative, diverse and inclusive public partnerships

This month, applications open for Programme Development Grants competition 34, including a brand new call to encourage inclusive new ways of partnership working between researchers, people and communities and other key stakeholders. Find out more in this webinar video.

‘Reaching Out’ shortlisted for Newcastle University’s Engagement and Place Awards, celebrating a partnership across the University, NIHR infrastructure and local communities that led to meaningful, sustainable and diverse involvement and engagement across the region

The ‘Reaching Out’ programme of work, which focused on increasing the diversity of voices in health and care research, has been shortlisted in Newcastle University’s Engagement and Place Awards 2022. The programme has been nominated in the Team Award category and was very much a collaborative effort, with all guidance, illustrations, solutions to sustainable engagement being co-developed together with community partners across Newcastle and the wider region. Those involved included Voluntary Organisation Network North East (VONNE) , the Research Design Service NENC, Clinical Research Network (CRN) NENC, Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) NENC, Policy Research Unit (PRU) Newcastle, Newcastle Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) and FUSE, the Centre for Translational Research in Public Health. Members of this broad team are delighted to be nominated, and to share their experience as an example of cross organisation collaboration making changes that will lead to sustainable, diverse involvement and engagement across Newcastle and beyond. You can read more and see the full shortlist here: Engagement and Place Awards

NIHR changes name to emphasise long-term commitment to social care research

The National Institute for Health Research has changed its name. To emphasise its enduring commitment to social care research, the NIHR will officially become the ‘National Institute for Health and Care Research’. The acronym ‘NIHR’ will remain unchanged.

Grant Development and Writing Workshop: What a difference 3 days makes..

RDS NENC recently hosted a three day Grant Development and Writing Workshop, our first face to face event in over two years!  The event, jointly hosted with the NIHR CRN NENC and NIHR ARC NENC was an opportunity for early career researchers to learn about the grant writing process whilst having dedicated time to work on their application and have expert advice to hand. One of the delegates Dr Rachel Collum, Lecturer in Psychology at the University of Sunderland, has written about her experience and how it has left her and her colleagues feeling inspired to move forward with their research idea.  Read her blog

NIHR unites with health and social care leaders to improve public involvement in research

Funders, regulators and research organisations who play an important role in UK health and social care research have come together, working with members of the public, to sign up to a bold new shared commitment to improve public involvement in research.

RfPB Competition 48 Stage 1 launched on 16 March 2022.

Submission deadline: 1pm, Wednesday 13 July 2022. Key dates can be found on the RfPB webpage. A Word template of the application form is also available on the RfPB website and can be found here.

High numbers of patients and public involved in NIHR’s work report a positive experience

A survey of public contributors involved in NIHR’s work has shown that patients, carers and the public are involved across many different stages of research, and the majority of people report a positive experience.  Read the full story

“How public involvement stopped me in my tracks”: Dr Grace Lewis on the importance of listening and learning when designing research

In a new blog post, Dr Grace Lewis writes about a discussion with members of the Elders Council of Newcastle that led her to re-think and re-design her research project completely. Having planned to explore “better conversations” with and about people living with frailty in acute healthcare settings, Dr Lewis shares how public involvement challenged her thinking—and how, rather than being disheartened, she listened to feedback from members of the Elders Council, and designed a project which is “completely different and hugely improved, for their input”. Click here to read the full blog post.

RDS Blogs: From the RDS desk

Each month, the Research Design Service, brings you handy tips, insights and experiences of the funding application process. The blogs touch on various themes in the design process and highlight what you need to know before you make a research application.

This month’s RDS blog, Capturing the Contribution, highlights the value and impact of our teams of pubic contributors, from the viewpoints of the public contributors themselves, the RDS advisers and researchers.

Read previous blogs below:

June 2022: Optimising recruitment to a clinical trial

May 2022: Key messages from the Thinking Ahead Study: Barriers and Enablers to End of Life Care Planning with Ethnically Diverse Patients, their Family and Health Care Professionals

April: Celebrating young people making a difference in health research

March 2022: All systems go: systems thinking in public health researc

February 2022: Making a case for the priority of a research topic,