What we do
The research and development team works across the whole of the Trust. We work closely with clinical teams and service users and offer a variety of local, national and international research studies and opportunities.
Why research is so important
Benefits
- Clinical trials aim to improve the health and quality of life for service users and the population.
- Without clinical trials there is a risk that treatments don’t work or could be harmful to service users.
- Research can help you can learn more about your condition and how to manage it.
- The NHS can get access to new treatments that are only available in trials.
- You can help support medical science and increase our knowledge of conditions and treatments.
What are clinical trials?
- Clinical trials are research studies that involve people.
- They test how well particular treatments work and whether they are safe
- They could be looking at medicines, equipment or therapeutic interventions
- Clinical trials are designed to answer the following main questions:
- Does a treatment work?
- Does it work better than other treatments?
- Does it have side effects?
Not all clinical trials involve drugs or treatments. They can also look at the care you receive and could involve:
- Interviews
- Questionnaires
- Researchers observing interactions with your care team
- Advising a research team
- Participating as a healthy volunteer
- Taking a blood or tissue sample
Share your story
If you’ve been involved in a clinical research trial and would like to share your story, we’d love to hear from you.
Please contact us on 01642 283501 or email TEWV.ResearchandDevelopment@nhs.net
Helping you conduct research
The research and development team are able to help if you’re interested in conducting your own research. We work in partnership with a number of organisations to widen research opportunities for our service users.
We’re currently working with Emergence, a national service user led organisation, with the aim of setting up a research project designed and led by people with experience of personality disorder.
We work closely with a number of university partners to develop new research studies, open research studies Trust-wide for recruitment and share results from research where TEWV patients and staff have taken part.
We’re a partner organisation of NIHR North East and North Cumbria.
Performance reports
The Trust is required to provide quarterly performance reports to the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) Central Commissioning Facility to understand how providers of NHS services are recruiting patients to clinical trials and how they are performing against their contractual requirements. In particular looking at:
- how quickly participants are recruited once a study is set up (time between date site selected and date first participant recruited)
- how many clinical trial participants are recruited to time and target
