Getting started in research delivery within general practice

Dr Uwa Ima-Edomwonyi, GP at Donneybrook Medical Centre in Greater Manchester, shares his practice’s journey to becoming research active, including useful advice on getting started.

Why and how I got started in research delivery at my practice? 

Many years before becoming a GP, I was a clinical research physician at a clinical research facility in Manchester, and at the back of my mind, I always knew I wanted to get back involved in research in some way. 

I got inspiration and motivation specifically around research delivery from attending a research session at an RCGP Annual Conference. After connecting with colleagues involved in research delivery up and down the country, the first thing I did was to sign up to NIHR-Learn and completed my Good Clinical Practice (GCP) training.  

I also investigated how other people had got started and quickly realised having a Research Lead at the practice was key, as well as putting a research team together. As Research Lead for the practice, you are basically the ‘point person’ at the practice for communication with external study teams. Someone who is enthusiastic about research and is happy to take the role of lead clinician, or principal investigator (PI) for studies.

Another key thing was contacting my local NIHR Regional Research Delivery Network (RRDN), which for me was the Northwest RDN team. They were super helpful and have been really supportive ever since. They initiated a call with us to go through everything, and sent through all the information we needed, with regards to getting started. 

Importantly the RRDN then placed us on their books. This way they could send us emails with information about research, portfolio studies, and non-commercial studies. For anything we were interested in, we would just fill out the expression of interest form, and they would connect us to the study team.  

Around that time, I also delivered a short presentation with my practice colleagues speaking about the benefits of getting involved with research from patient, practice staff and NHS perspectives. The partners and practice manager were all really supportive, so we went ahead and put things together, set up a team and got them trained up in GCP too. 

Our first year delivering research as a practice 

Initially we got involved with a qualitative study with Manchester University. They were looking at how practices make use of our community pharmacy resources, which was quite an interesting one.  

We also contributed data to the Hidden Workload study, which was done by the Primary Care Academic Collaborative (PACT) in collaboration with NIHR and more recently have signed up to two NIHR BioResource studies D-CYPHR & Improving Black Health Outcomes (IBHO). 

I've enjoyed starting up a new research team that we didn’t have before and going from a research naïve to a research active practice. That process has been not without its challenges but it’s been enjoyable. Importantly, doing it as a team has been encouraging and being able to provide our patient population with new innovative interventions has been very satisfying as well.  

One of the key challenges getting started was forming the team. It was initially made up of our practice manager and myself (as research lead). We then added another administrative member of staff (our practice co-ordinator) who became the research co-ordinator and supports managing study site files and assisting with any relevant related paperwork. Our workload is already very full, but over time by just encouraging one another, trying to motivate team members to get their training done, have quick catch-up meetings, and getting paperwork done, thankfully the team came together quite nicely.  

Tips for practices looked to get started in research delivery 

My advice would be definitely get involved in research delivery! 

If you want to follow my path, these are the keys steps from my experience: 

• Link up with other colleagues who are already in research and learn from their experiences 
• Complete your GCP training on NIHR Learn  
• Build support with your practice colleagues. Assign a Research Lead within the practice, in our case I took on the role, and continue to encourage staff to engage with research activities 
• Finally, 100% reach out to your Regional Research Delivery Network. You just need to email them and they're really, really helpful, super supportive and they'll hold your hand through it all. 

And before you know, you’ll be a research active practice, delivering research that is relevant to your patient population. 

For more resources on research delivery visit:

RCGP Research Engagement Hub