In a major national initiative, the BHF Clinical Research Collaborative are supporting the Heart Surgery Prioritisation Setting Partnership to host a series of online workshops to pump prime potential research teams who can come together to develop high quality research proposals for funders. These workshops were originally planned to be held in July as a one day, face to face event, however due to the ongoing situation with Coronavirus and in order to ensure momentum, they will now take place online.
What are the workshops for?
The workshops aim to bring patients, carers, health services researchers, and clinicians, together, virtually through Microsoft Teams, to develop multidisciplinary collaboratives who will undertake world-class research that addresses the Top 10 research priorities identified by the James Lind Alliance – click here for details. The next step is to translate these priorities into research questions, or even better, clinical trials that answer these questions, and aim to improve the lives of patients with cardiovascular disease.
To develop these priorities into robust research questions, and hopefully integrated clinical trials, eight individual workshops will be run over a course of several months. The workshops will include all key stakeholders with the aim of developing high quality funding applications for clinical trials where these are needed.
What support is the BHF CRC giving to the project?
The BHF CRC is giving the essential IT support that is required to enable momentum to continue through virtual workshops, via the Microsoft Teams environment. As the CRC now has an established sophisticated, state of the art IT platform, it is also able to provide a collaborative workspace that allows for file sharing, video and telephone conference facilities and instant messaging. This ensures all of the work will be under one domain and will as it is a Cloud based solution, participants of the workshops and the moderator groups leading on the clinical trial questions will be able to access from any location and from any device.
This is an exciting time for the CRC to be involved in such an integrated and inclusive project and we are looking forward to providing support to other research groups using a similar model or providing a bespoke solution for their research needs.