Manchester awarded £6.2 million to make NHS a safer place
16 Mar 2012
The University of Manchester in partnership with NHS Greater Manchester has been awarded more than £6.2 million to help make the NHS a safer place for patients, the Government announced today (Friday).
The money is a share of £13 million, which comes from the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), and will be used to advance and refine new ways of improving safety in hospitals, GP surgeries and in the community.
A team at the Manchester research centre will develop a new internet-based tool to help improve diagnoses made by nurses and doctors in GP surgeries. The tool will identify symptoms of cancer and rare diseases, which will help clinicians who are in any doubt about making a diagnosis.
Aneez Esmail, Professor of General Practice, will be Director of the Manchester NIHR Patient Safety Translational Research Centre with Dr Stephen Campbell as Deputy Director. A second centre will be established at Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust in London.
Professor Esmail said: "We are delighted to have been successful in this competitive bid and it reflects on the strength of research in primary care that is carried out in Manchester.
"Patient safety in primary care is an important problem that is under researched and we are committed to developing innovations with our international and national partners to make the care that patients receive from their general practitioners safer.
"We have set out an ambitious programme of research and we will be working closely with our local communities of patients and general practitioners to ensure that areas such as prescribing and dispensing of medications, the diagnosis of diseases and the way that care is coordinated is improved and made safer."
Secretary of State for Health Andrew Lansley said: "Keeping patients safe is a vital part of better Healthcare. New ideas can really help NHS staff to improve processes and make care safer and of high quality. Our research in these world-leading centres will help us to achieve among the safest services anywhere.
“This is why we are investing in this area to make sure that patients
receive the highest quality of care.”
Promoting and fostering this kind of clinical research is one of the Government’s top priorities, and through the Health and Social Care Bill the role that research plays in the health service will continue to be strengthened.
Professor Dame Sally C Davies, Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Adviser at the Department of Health, said: “These centres are world-class in the highly specialised field of translational patient safety research, and were chosen by a panel of international experts.
“Their work will result in new ideas, techniques and approaches being adopted across the NHS to improve patient outcomes.”
Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, NHS Medical Director, said: "People base their healthcare decisions in the knowledge that medical problems carry risk and that the best treatment often carries a different set of risks. The overall risk should not be made worse by the way we do things or deliver our services.
“The rigorous, high quality research to be carried out by these NIHR centres will ensure that this avoidable level of risk is reduced or eliminated and lead to safer services for all patients.”
The research centres are partnerships between universities and NHS Trusts. This reinforces the relationship between researchers and clinicians, and helps make sure that new ideas make the leap to the clinic or ward.
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