Community and Health Research Unit

The CaHRU team spent a December awayday at Lincolnshire’s Branston Hall, reflecting on past and ongoing work, discussing current challenges and exploring future opportunities for the research centre. Over the past year the centre has continued to build on its strong collaborations with health service and academic partners (both internal and external to the university), which has led to increasing success in attracting external funding, achieving publications and securing research funding.

In the next year CaHRU will begin new projects on the ethics of ambulance trials (funded by the Wellcome Trust), pain management in ambulance services (funded by the Falck Foundation, Denmark) and evaluation of a new pathway for care of people with diabetes presenting with low blood sugar (hypoglycaemia) to ambulance services (funded by the East Midlands Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care). The centre will continue its work on ambulance trials (RIGHT2 funded by the British Heart Foundation) and service delivery (Variation in Ambulance Non-conveyance funded by the NIHR), prescribing safety in primary care (Scaling up PINCER funded by the Health Foundation) and regional networks such as the East Midlands Network for Quality Improvement Research and Education (ENQuIRE, funded by the East Midlands Academic Health Science Network and Health Foundation).

The awayday provided an important opportunity for CaHRU staff to have their say on future developments. Next year the centre will continue to expand with the appointment of two postdoctoral staff who will join the team including a qualitative researcher and health economist. The awayday was supported by funding from the University of Lincoln team achievement award for research which CaHRU won in 2015 for a consecutive year.

The Community and Health Research Unit (CaHRU) has been awarded status as a university Research Centre. CaHRU’s mission is to increase people’s health and well-being by improving the quality, performance and systems of care across the health, social and third sector care services through interdisciplinary translational research.

CaHRU’s objectives are:

to improve people’s health and well-being by shaping the development of health and social care services and systems in the UK and internationally through excellent interdisciplinary translational research;
to promote high quality care which enhances the experience, safety, effectiveness, efficiency and equity of healthcare by examining and transforming the performance and function of health and social care practice, organisation and delivery;
to engage service users, carers, practitioners, managers, commissioners and policymakers in our research;
to ensure that we maximise the impact of our research by responding to service priorities, working with service users and care organisations to embed research into practice and disseminate findings using the notion of ‘dissemination by design’ and through a variety of media;
to enable our researchers to achieve their highest potential through a research environment that encourages cooperation, collaboration and mutual support.

The new centre, which will still be known as CaHRU, is staffed by 14 core researchers but benefits from working with many colleagues in other academic groups, other academic institutions and health services in a range of disciplines and focuses on translational, empirical and operational research relating to quality improvement in health and social care.