Celebrating Incubator Success – NIHR Incubator Celebratory Day 2023

Celebration 2023

Celebrating Incubator Success – NIHR Incubator Celebratory Day 2023

NIHR Incubators are intended to address areas where there is a need to build research capacity on a national level. NIHR provides some funding to enable stakeholders to identify the barriers that exist and to suggest and implement, where possible, solutions to building research capacity in a sustainable and meaningful way. The NIHR Incubator Celebratory Day, held in the Royal College of General Practitioners, brought members from past and present incubators together to celebrate their successes.

We were delighted to join other incubators to reflect on our progress so far. The NIHR Incubator for Clinical Education Research was represented by Gill Vance (Newcastle), Sophie Park (UCL), Cecily Henry (PPIE Representative), Megan Brown (Newcastle), Bryan Burford (Newcastle), and Hannah Gillespie (Newcastle).

We started the day by hearing from each incubator about their key successes. Whilst each incubator is unique, key achievements were often around engagement, inclusion of early career researchers, and facilitating training and mentoring. We shared some of the key successes of our incubator activities – training events across the continuum of academic careers, successful published outputs, individual successes in obtaining NIHR funding, and winning the Association for the Study of Medical Education ‘Institutional Commitment to Scholarship’ Award.

Gill Vance then joined the leads of the Nursing and Midwifery Incubator and Emergency Care Incubator in a panel discussion focused on the role of early career researchers within incubators. She shared how Early Career Researchers have been members of our advisory group, have co-led workstreams, and have had opportunities to work with researchers from different institutions to develop training programmes, join research teams, and write for publication.

As an early career researcher, I first got involved in the work of the incubator as a member of the barriers workstream, working with other incubator members to identify potential barriers in recruitment and retention in ClinEdR across the health professions. Through this work I have had opportunities work alongside researchers from different institutions and career stages to develop training events to target some of these identified needs. I have also been encouraged and enabled to attend training events and start to work with others to deliver training for others. I have also been given the opportunity to write an article alongside other early career researchers, which will soon be published as part of a series of articles from members of the incubator, in The Clinical Teacher. For me, working with the incubator has shown me the possibilities for career progression in ClinEdR, and helped me enormously when applying for an NIHR Academic Clinical Fellowship. I’m delighted to continue with the incubator in it’s ongoing work, and hope that other early career researchers might join us too.

In a second panel discussion, we heard from the leads of the Mental Health Social Care Incubator, Pharmacy Professionals Incubator, Paediatric Critical Care Incubator, and Applied Health and Care Research Methodology, who discussed the barriers the incubators have faced. The spoke of the opportunities and challenges presented by working through the pandemic, of engaging very busy individuals into the work of the incubator, and also, maximising opportunities to work with PPIE partners.

We finished the day with an interactive session on Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI), led by members of the newly formed NIHR Race Equity and Diversity in Careers (ReDic) Incubator. We heard about ongoing initiatives from the NIHR to build EDI within their programmes and the research they fund. Professor Christopher Millward then shared his research on differential attainment in higher education, outlining how the potential impact this has on the development of research careers. We then spoke with incubators about how we have addressed EDI in our work so far, and were tasked with a challenge to think carefully about our EDI strategies going forward, so as to maximise the potential of our incubators work.

We had a very enjoyable day – this was a great opportunity to reflect on the work we have done (and, the work that remains!) As we move towards the next phase in our work, we look forward to developing some of these ideas and working collaboratively with other incubators to do so.

There are now 10 current NIHR Incubators. You can find out more about them at NIHR Incubators

If you are interested in learning more about the Incubator for Clinical Education Research, you can sign up here.