Community and Health Research Unit

Prof Niro Siriwardena spoke at the first engagement event of a new multi-organisational general practice quality improvement collaborative at the Stratford Olympic Park this February. The collaborative led by Professor Martin Marshall and his team at University College London, under the auspices of the Guttmann Academic Partnership launched in 2014, will involve working with NHS Newham Clinical Commissioning Group (CCG) and UCL Partners to support safer prescribing in Newham general practice.

Professor Siriwardena gave an introduction to quality improvement science approaches in his talk ‘How can QI methods in general help to solve these [safety] challenges?’ at the inaugural meeting together with other experts in collaboratives, including Prof Marshall and Dr Neil Houston from NHS Scotland, and local general practitioners. The talk was based on experience from regional and national quality improvement collaboratives such as the Resources for Effective Sleep Treatment project and the Ambulance Services cardiovascular Quality Initiative. Prof Siriwardena has recently been part of a team awarded funding from the Health Foundation for a new regional collaborative aimed at ‘Improving prescribing safety in general practices in the East Midlands through the PINCER intervention.’

The engagement event took place at the Sir Ludwig Guttman Health and Well Being Centre situated in the Olympic Park in Stratford, originally designed as the medical practice for the London 2012 Summer Olympics. It was well attended by general practitioners, patients and academic experts supporting the initiative and is part of the impact activity of CaHRU’s new research centre.

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.