By NIHR Newcastle PSRC

SafetyNet has been created as a way for the funded PSRCs in England to work together. This is an excellent opportunity for us to share our experience and expertise to maximise the outputs of the funding provided by NIHR.

As a new PSRC in Newcastle, we must establish a brand-new collaborative, bringing together various academic leaders in patient safety research across our partner Universities and hospital trusts. The formation of SafetyNet allows us to learn from the previously funded PSTRCs to benefit from their experience. This has been invaluable for us during the initial stages of our award, providing peer support and outlining different ways of approaching some of the challenges of setting up our unit.

Sharing expertise

SafetyNet provides the platform to share expertise and create synergies across our research areas. We have created links across PSRCs between colleagues with methodological expertise, for example health economics or artificial intelligence.

We will establish meetings of these groups, which in turn will develop collaborations, with a view to developing larger collaborative grant applications, addressing patient safety challenges on a much greater scale than would otherwise be the case.

Training and development

A key aspect of all PSRCs is the development of research capacity through the training and development of research staff who will eventually go on to be leaders in the patient safety research field. SafetyNet is providing opportunities for our trainees to network and socialise their research at an early stage in its development.

We have the opportunity for our researchers to create meetings to formally share their work and early results or to focus on an individual discipline or research methodology, which has relevance for the PSRCs.

We are enthusiastic about the creation of SafetyNet and we look forward to it helping us to achieve our aims and objectives for the Newcastle NIHR PSRC moving forward over the next four years.

You can find out more about the Newcastle PSRC on their website.

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