"Our new Academic Themes will have a big impact on the health and wellbeing of our communities"

At Wessex Health Partners we’re still discovering how we can be most useful to the region, but we’re confident our new Academic Themes will have a big impact on the health and wellbeing of our communities. 

Some time ago, we realised Wessex Health Partners was uniquely placed to create new collaborations between our universities and local NHS organisations – bringing experts together to develop new research projects addressing the health needs of our local populations with global reach. And in doing so, we could work together to make applications to large, external funding bodies such as the National Institute for Health and Care Research, drawing new investment into the region.  

We spent a year consulting across the partnership both to identify our world class strengths and to define our local healthcare needs. From this work, four broad themes were identified. The aim of these is to support and facilitate research at scale, focusing on pan-regional challenges too broad for any one organisation to tackle alone. The themes focus on current gaps in research and innovation and are loosely defined to enable researchers to play to their own strengths: 

Services Health - the health and wellbeing of serving and veteran services personnel 

Health Inequalities and Multimorbidity - the harms associated with the intersection between alcohol, obesity and deprivation 

Genomics - the use of genomic medicine to limit the harms arising from polypharmacy in the elderly (taking too many medications)  

Air Quality – investigating the impact of poor air quality on health and wellbeing 

These Themes are underpinned by the use of population data and, where appropriate, health technology. 

The next step was to run workshops for each theme, introducing partners to one another and starting to build cross-organisational collaborations to develop research proposals. 

We are delighted each of these workshops has generated several potential research proposals which can be taken to external funding bodies. Over the coming months we will develop these applications in more workshops and in group work.  

Our Academic Themes have already established new partnerships and sparked conversations that would never have happened without the Partners coming together to form WHP, giving us the space and momentum to think at a regional level.  

Here’s some feedback from those taking part.  

Ash Boreham, Content Expert for the Services Health Theme: "The Wessex region has a significant Armed Forces Community - serving, veterans, families and carers. The workshops are helping us shape future research into veterans and dementia, Commonwealth soldiers and families’ transition, service women’s occupations and long-term impact on health, and improved access to addiction treatment. Knowledge mobilisation is a powerful concept, and applying this research through policy will change and improve lives in our Armed Forces Community."

Sir Stephen Holgate, said of the Air Quality Theme: "Wessex has its particular air pollution challenges especially from shipping, wood burning, transport and farming with the greatest exposures occurring in disadvantaged communities. Coming together in this way gives us access to environmental and health data in Wessex, along with the expertise in our universities and local authorities providing a unique opportunity to understand more about how pollution is impacting people in the south." 

Another delegate from the Air Quality Academic Theme commented: ‘It was terrific having researchers from many disciplines with us in the room, and also those on the front line whose job it is to translate new findings into public benefit. Co-development is going to be the key. The academic themes will set the framework for a truly interdisciplinary multi-institutional research proposal that takes full advantage of our location in Wessex."

If you would like any further information on our Academic Themes and how to contribute to future workshops, please contact nina.barratt@wessexhp.org.uk