Patients in the Bristol area are set to receive even better care in primary care settings, thanks to research that will be done at the University of Bristol.
The University is one of five founding universities in the Department of Health’s new School for Primary Care Research. The School will receive £3 million per year for research.
The money will facilitate research into the huge range of areas of professional practice relevant to primary care. It will include looking at everything from the medicines a patient is prescribed and what tests should be run on patients, to what general advice should be given about a condition.
Professor Debbie Sharp, head of the University of Bristol’s Academic Unit of Primary Health Care said: “This is fantastic news for Bristol. The research will improve care for people with major health problems and will enable us to investigate a range of new ways of improving care, such as finding new methods of preventing ill health, and evaluating novel ways of providing information to patients and staff.”
The five founding departments of the new School for Primary Care Research, will be at the universities of Birmingham, Bristol, Cambridge, Manchester and Oxford. The school will run under the directorship of Professor Martin Roland, Director of General Practice at the National Primary Care R&D Centre based at the University of Manchester.
Andy Burnham, Minister for Delivery and Quality, said:
“Over 95% of patient contacts with the NHS take place in primary care. It therefore essential that the decisions taken in Primary Care by doctors, nurses and patients, are informed by the highest quality, most relevant evidence. The NHS has a key role to play in determining the future health and wealth of this country, and the Government is determined to harness its capacity to make the UK the best place in the world for health research.”
He added: “The new National Institute for Health Research School for Primary Care Research will allow enthusiastic, dedicated individuals to ask the right questions and set about finding an appropriate way of answering them. The vision is of research leadership and a world-class environment to conduct clinical trials and other well-designed studies in primary care and at the interface with secondary/tertiary care. This will provide considerable benefit to patients and the health of the population through the new knowledge gained by excellent research and the improvements in care and preventative strategies which will follow.”