More than 500 people trained in CLAHRC West’s capacity building programme
19 July 2017
Our training programme, which has been running since May 2015, has now trained more than 500 people and delivered 44 training events, across a range of NHS, local authority and voluntary sector organisations. At CLAHRC West, we are working to build a culture of evidence informed healthcare and evaluation across our region, and even further afield. One of the main ways we do this is through our capacity building and training programme.
People from a range of disciplines and backgrounds have attended, including clinical staff from medical, nursing and allied health backgrounds, public health staff, academics and managers and commissioners of NHS services.
Our capacity building team
The capacity building team is made up of Dr Issy Bray, Abby Sabey and Professor Selena Gray. The team began in September 2014 with an open brief to build capacity in health research. They started out with a scoping exercise to explore demand for research training, as well as some data collection about existing training provision in the region.
How they developed the training programme
The team started by understanding the local evidence based culture and training needs in CLAHRC West’s partner organisations. They interviewed learning and training leads in December 2014 to gain a rapid insight into the evidence, research and evaluation training needs of staff. This revealed that organisations were supportive of using evidence to inform health and care, but some very real practical constraints such as staffing levels and budget cuts, as well as lack of confidence in certain staff groups, mean many staff do not undertake research training beyond their compulsory pre-registration education.
This suggested there would be benefit in working at a grass roots level to increase engagement in research across the workforce.
Alongside this, the team also scoped existing provision by contacting all the local universities to identify health research related training, as well as local trust and online provision for NHS staff.
Lastly the team used their experiences as academics with many years of teaching healthcare professionals and evidence based professionals, to help inform the type of courses to run. They also wanted to consider the local health research environment and areas in which they could deliver cutting-edge training.
This was completed by March 2015 and they began to deliver training in May 2015.
Types of courses
Courses the team run regularly include:
Getting your article published
Service evaluation
Project evaluation for the voluntary sector
Using evidence to lead
Questionnaire design
Genetics and epigenetics for public health
How to win at Twitter
Writing for a lay audience
These are delivered by a combination of CLAHRC West staff, academics and experts from our local health and care system.
Feedback
The courses routinely receive very positive feedback. Some comments include:
“I found the whole event very informative and I have learnt a huge amount.”
“The speaker was a font of information, the session was run interactively so we could ask questions as we went along, which was really beneficial. Lots of concrete examples of how to apply the knowledge.”