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17 Dec 2021

A Christmas message to ARC members

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An end-of-year message to all ARC NENC members, from Professor Eileen Kaner and Professor Chris Price.

And so this is Christmas, and what have we done?

As we come to the end of 2021, we wanted to thank you for your continued contribution to our Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) for the North East and North Cumbria (NENC).

We may not have been fully locked-down over this last year, but we’ve still had to live and work within the context of uncertainty that COVID-19 brings.

We’ve had to continue to be flexible – adjusting and adapting to changing circumstances as they’ve emerged. Your flexibility and resilience has meant that we’ve still been able to make a huge amount of progress as an ARC – despite many continuing challenges – and we wanted to take this opportunity to reflect back on what we’ve achieved as a collaborative community, this year.

In the last 12 months, we’ve completed our recruitment of 27 PhD students and 20 Research Fellows across six universities – significantly growing our applied research capacity in the region.

We’ve also funded 12 Applied Health/Public Health Masters places at Newcastle and Northumbria Universities, and received a high number of applications from health and social care professionals hoping to join us as Practitioner Research Fellows in 2022.

Our Open Funding Competition for 2021 was extremely popular, and we received 128 high-quality applications from a wide range of collaborative teams. From this, we were able to fund 22 research projects tackling key health and social care projects across our region, totalling £1.1M. This means we’ve supported a total of 53 projects worth £2.7M through our Open Funding Competitions, so far.

As an ARC, we’ve also been successful in attracting some significant further funding for applied research in our region – including £3.75M for two NIHR ‘national priority’ research programmes into Prevention including Behavioural Risk Factors, and Health and Care Inequalities. Work is now underway to deliver these programmes, in collaboration with ARCs across the country, and we’ll be hosting a national conference linked to this work in late 2022.

In addition to this, we’ve recently secured new funding to build mental health capacity and capability across the region, taking our direct grant funding from £9M to £13.5M

We’re also looking forward to welcoming Oonagh McGee as our new Chief Operating Officer in early 2022. Oonagh currently manages an NIHR Policy Research Unit and has extensive experience of managing large-scale research programmes.

Finally, and sadly, in October we learned of the sudden passing of our respected and admired colleague Professor James Law. James was Professor of Speech and Language Sciences at Newcastle University and lead of the ARC’s Supporting Children and Families theme. Within the ARC, James brought energy, commitment, expertise and a genuine passion to want to improve the lives of children. His close colleague, Professor Judith Rankin has written a tribute to James Law on behalf of the ARC, which you can read here.

James will be hugely missed by us all.

2021 has indeed brought its challenges, as well as its successes. As we come to the end of another eventful year, we would like to take this opportunity to wish you a safe, healthy, peaceful and restorative Christmas, and a Happy New Year.

Professor Eileen Kaner, Director, ARC NENC

Professor Chris Price, Deputy Director, ARC NENC