By Professor Mark Gabbay, Director of ARC NWC
“None of us is as smart as all of us.” – the words of Ken Blanchard, American author and business professional.
I like that quote as it’s fairly common for a group of organisations collaborating together to come up with a better idea to make their outputs/services better than the smartest single entity could ever do by working alone. In fact sustaining joint working until change is achieved and evaluated with subsequent evidence of impact, is always the biggest challenge and I would suggest the benchmark to compare against.
Each of our partners in ARC NWC have their own strengths and weaknesses, various levels of knowledge and different areas of expertise but a collaboration must be underpinned with accessible and validated data, investment in the research capacity of staff involved and the right expertise and guidance to implement lasting change with findings. These are the true gaps ARC NWC aims to bridge between the different areas of the collaboration to achieve success.
Those delivering health and social care know these particular challenges better than any other sector and yet all too often those pieces of the puzzle often fail to make a final picture of health that reflects a real operational difference for the final end user.
To address this, now that ARC NWC Phase 2 has launched, we are currently finalising our own internal processes for commissioning and managing projects within the collaboration and are preparing documentation on our exact “offer” to partners. We have appointed Public Contributor Champions to themes and are still appointing staff although this is progressing well with over 90% appointed and in place.
While the approach to our research portfolio will be to focus on larger projects, aligned with our research theme strategies and addressing regional/national priorities, the collaboration infrastructure presents lots of opportunity to access expertise and advice. We will be featuring examples of this in the coming months in this newsletter. A significant proportion of our work will be supporting research into practice whilst actively evaluating the processes to do so and then helping spread at scale regionally and nationally. This is how we get the impacts that make a tangible difference to improving health and care and reducing inequities.
This is the first Newsletter we aim to compile monthly for all of our interested stakeholders. We realise with 80+ partners we will need a separate, more tailored communications approach for them and their nominated practitioner champions. e.g. implementation support and sharing of evidence, queries regarding proposed research questions and more about the latest opportunities for investment in research capacity building. Therefore, we are keen to hear your preferred ideas and methods to engage with you. Please email them to charlesd@liverpool.ac.uk
Same address for any stories or blogs (to go in this very space) and please let us have any updates from you to help share what we are doing each month, across the collaboration.
Our research themes have already started to update their web pages in addition to publishing their meetings and attendance at partner events. That is just a small part of the foundations needed moving forward, to ensure that all of us are working as one and in the same collaborative direction as we know that is the smart thing to do.
Thank you for your continued support and patience. Any general queries to arcnwc@liverpool.ac.uk.
Professor Mark Gabbay
Director, ARC NWC