St Luke’s is a visionary centre. With a clear focus on supporting the people of Sheffield and surrounding areas, and the ingrained values of ensuring dignity, compassion, inspiration and pioneering work, the service continues to look ahead and outwards for ways to expand its remit and deliver ever more effective care to those who need it.
To ensure our services are as effective as possible, it is important that we remain up to date with the latest evidence and promote a culture of research. In addition, many of our patients and clients, as well as their families and carers express a desire to be involved in research and we understand that part of our role is to help facilitate these opportunities.
Our research strategy has been founded on four key priorities. (1) Governance and procedures; (2) Infrastructure; (3) Activity and (4) Funding. Our achievements to date have moved St Luke’s to a strong position of research engagement and generation. Research activity is well integrated into the organisation, and St Luke’s is engaging with other research-active, generating and leading units around the country.
Drawing on this position, these priorities still remain the core of ongoing development of the research strategy. The main targets for developing a longer-term research plan are building research capacity, enhancing the research infrastructure, increasing engagement of staff in research activity and increasing engagement of the NIHR.
To date we have established collaborations with Sheffield Centre For Health & Related Research at the University of Sheffield & The Wolfson Palliative Care Research Centre at Hull York Medical School in the development of our research ambitions, and have supported a number of our staff to develop their own research ideas into grant applications which will recruit participants from the hospice setting.
Our desire to develop our workforce alongside the research agenda, has resulted in research training provided by Sheffield Hallam University’s Introduction to Research module, encouraging and enabling our staff to complete GCP and Informed Consent training provided by the NIHR and facilitate library access at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHSFT to enable our workforce to review the latest available evidence to influence their practice.
Further information on the importance of undertaking research within hospice settings is available through Hospice UK here.