25 November 2011
Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust is one of 11 partners in the planned Academic Health Science Partnership announced by Imperial College London today.
The AHSP intends to bring together providers of primary, secondary, tertiary, community and mental healthcare in north west London to work with Imperial College London to improve the health and care of the area’s population of 1.9 million people.
Professor the Lord Darzi, Paul Hamlyn chair of surgery at Imperial College London and former parliamentary under-secretary of state at the Department of Health, has developed the proposal, which aims to support collaborative approaches in innovating in healthcare and present opportunities to conduct clinical trials at a large and meaningful scale, the findings of which will benefit a greater number of patients. The AHSP could also take a leading role in training and educating healthcare professionals.
Lord Darzi said: “The partners involved in developing the AHSP face many common challenges but have one unifying goal: to bring the highest quality care to the people of north west London. By focusing on our strengths and systematically implementing what is known across the partnership about providing the best clinical care through innovation, we should achieve much more than we could apart.
The Trust’s chief executive Bob Bell said: “Royal Brompton & Harefield has a strong and established relationship with Imperial College; we already jointly run two Biomedical Research Units with government funding of £20 million, were founding partners in Imperial's Academic Health Science System in June 2010, and our published research collaborations are regularly the most highly cited in Europe for cardiac, cardiovascular, critical and respiratory care. We are therefore extremely pleased to be part of this wider Academic Health Science Partnership, which we believe will bring demonstrable benefit to patients in north west London and throughout the UK, as well as to clinical research and medical science.”
In addition to Imperial College London and Royal Brompton & Harefield NHS Foundation Trust, the other trusts involved in the new alliance are:
- Central London Community Healthcare NHS Trust
- Central North West London NHS Foundation Trust
- Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust
- Ealing Hospital NHS Trust
- Hillingdon Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust
- Hounslow and Richmond Community Healthcare NHS Trust
- Imperial College Healthcare NHS Trust
- North West London Hospitals NHS Trust
- West London Mental Health Trust
- West Middlesex University Hospital NHS Trust
This is the first partnership of its kind in north west London and the partners hope to launch the AHSP formally in April 2012.
Read more about the partnership on Imperial College London’s website
Read about the biomedical research units at Royal Brompton Hospital
