The role of the 'NHS fellows' is to develop relationships between researchers and commissioners to create more NHS relevant bids, increase research awareness amongst commissioners and help put research into practice.
Rachel Anthwal comes from South West Commissioning Support Unit and is assisting Sarah Purdy on her SPCR funded study of primary care factors in hospital admissions and Lesley Wye on her HS&DR funded study of knowledge exchange between commissioners and commercial providers. Jude Carey comes from Bristol CCG and has been working with Gene Feder on his NIHR programme grant around domestic violence. They joined Lesley Wye, who recently won a NIHR Knowledge Mobilisation Fellowship for three years starting in June 2014. In this fellowship, Lesley will be working with commissioners from CCGs and CSUs to develop service evaluation skills, mobilising researchers' methodological knowledge. The independent evaluation will use a realist evaluation approach to develop initial hypotheses of what works (and what does not) to be tested in future evaluation rounds. For further information, please get in touch with Jude Carey (jude.carey@bristol.ac.uk) or Lesley Wye (lesley.wye@bristol.ac.uk).