Reflections on collaborative research delivery in Wales

Dr Janice St John-Matthews explores how Health and Care Research Wales is helping to make research part of everyday practice

By Dr Janice St John-Matthews, national head of research delivery, nurses, midwives and allied health professionals at Health and Care Research Wales

By Dr Janice St John-Matthews, national head of research delivery, nurses, midwives and allied health professionals at Health and Care Research Wales

Since joining Health and Care Research Wales and working across services in Wales over the past six months, I have been reminded of something simple but important: research delivery works best when it grows from the day-to-day realities of teams who know the pressures and priorities of their services. Health and Care Research Wales aims to support exactly that by connecting people, easing processes and enabling colleagues to take part in research confidently and safely.

One piece of work that illustrates this ethos has involved bringing together perspectives from imaging departments across Wales, not to produce definitive guidance or policy, but to listen carefully, share back what has been heard and create space for teams to reflect on what might help in their own settings. For imaging professionals, this matters because research is most sustainable when it fits alongside day-to-day clinical practice rather than sitting apart from it.

Collaboration in practice

This work has been shaped jointly by Kate Milne, senior research delivery health care scientist, and Dr Kieran Foley, imaging specialty lead. Kieran is a consultant radiologist with interests in gastrointestinal imaging, oncology and research, working across the Royal Glamorgan Hospital, Velindre Cancer Centre and the National Imaging Academy Wales (NIAW). He is also a clinical senior lecturer in the division of cancer and genetics at Cardiff University.

Together, their role has been to gather views, draw out common themes and offer material that departments can adapt if they choose. None of this is prescriptive and nothing is fixed; it’s simply a reflection of conversations held across Wales.

Health and Care Research Wales as a connector

One of the strengths of working in Wales is the way health and research systems connect. Health and Care Research Wales is the support and delivery arm of health and care research within the Science, Research and Evidence division of the Welsh Government. It is structured as a network linking NHS organisations, higher education institutions, local authorities and its funded research centres and units across the country.

The intention is to make research part of everyday practice, something that can sit alongside routine care, rather than apart from it. This model gives Health and Care Research Wales the ability to share learning widely. For services, this means research support that is coordinated rather than fragmented.

Kate’s professional grounding

Kate’s professional journey has been shaped by hands-on experience across clinical, patient-facing and research delivery roles. Beginning her career as a Therapeutic Radiographer, she developed a close understanding of cancer pathways, treatment pressures and multidisciplinary team working, which continues to inform her approach to research delivery.

Subsequent roles, including patient advice and liaison officer, clinical trials support officer and therapeutic research radiographer, strengthened her understanding of governance, patient experience and the practical realities of delivering research alongside clinical services. Together, these roles have given her a grounded perspective on how research can be integrated into everyday practice in a way that is realistic and proportionate.

Alongside her formal posts, Kate serves as an expert member on both a research ethics committee and the UK MS Register Clinical Advisory Board, bringing forward her experience of patient recruitment, informed consent and practical delivery considerations. Taken together, these roles have given her a rounded understanding of how services work, how people experience care and how research can be integrated sensitively and realistically into everyday practice.

What imaging teams told us

When Kate and Kieran spoke with imaging colleagues across Wales, they heard a broadly consistent set of themes – issues that will be familiar to many radiographers and imaging professionals reading this. Among the points raised were:

The value of clarity around processes used across studies.
The importance of realistic scheduling and protected time when research imaging is needed.
Recognising departments require flexibility, particularly where capacity is tight
The benefit of maintaining simple, shared approaches so that research looks familiar wherever it takes place.

Placing this in the wider system

Wales’s national work on imaging, through the National Imaging Programme, aligned workforce planning and the NIAW, creates an environment where services are already thinking about sustainability, quality and standardisation. Those programmes are not specifically about research, but they do shape the conditions that make research imaging more feasible and consistent.

Health and Care Research Wales’s wider infrastructure also helps by linking R&D offices, trials units and support functions across health boards, ensuring that research delivery is not carried by individual departments alone.

A ‘One Wales’ mindset

The work Kate and Kieran undertook reflects a wider One Wales commitment – an understanding that, when we share learning openly and build solutions together, we make it easier for services to participate in research at a pace and scale that feels manageable. “Kate’s and Kieran’s work exemplifies our ‘One Wales’ approach: start with what departments tell you, co-create the response with clinical leads and build only what helps people deliver care and research well,” says Dr Nicola Williams, national director of support and delivery at Health and Care Research Wales.

Keeping expectations modest and grounded

Nothing produced through this work represents policy or mandated change. It is simply material gathered from conversations, something departments can look at if it feels useful. Next steps, where they happen, will be shaped by individual services and supported by the national programmes that sit alongside them.

Alongside this, there is a broader national context that reinforces the importance of strengthening research delivery infrastructure. Recent UK-wide investment linked to the Voluntary Scheme for Branded Medicines Pricing, Access and Growth (VPAG) has placed a particular focus on improving the infrastructure for clinical trials. While this is one driver among many, it reflects a wider commitment to making the UK a more efficient and attractive place to run studies.

In Wales, VPAG complements work already underway to strengthen research delivery infrastructure, including the establishment of a Commercial Research Delivery Centre, which helps coordinate and support commercial research activity across health boards. Further examples include:

Standardised reporting

RECIST (response evaluation criteria in solid tumours) provides a standard approach to measuring treatment response in clinical trials. At the NIAW, funding has supported RECIST training, with further training planned following its identification as a key gap in oncology trials.

Infrastructure for new technical architecture

Work is underway to develop a repository of fully anonymised imaging data to support large-scale clinical trials, alongside new infrastructure roles and linked hardware investment.

This work is complemented by a wider network of enabling roles, partnerships and shared infrastructure that support services to take part in research, including organisations such as the NIAW, which can help bridge workforce development, innovation and research delivery.

For radiographers, the takeaway is simple: VPAG signals continued UK-wide focus on expanding clinical research opportunities, which may gradually increase the visibility of research across diagnostic and imaging pathways. It does not mandate specific changes, but it provides a backdrop that reinforces the importance of research capacity, clarity and joined-up working across NHS services.

Why this matters to radiographers

For radiographers and imaging professionals, the value of this work lies not in new instructions but in shared understanding. Many colleagues said:

Simple, familiar processes make research more approachable.
Time and capacity need to be considered realistically.
Recognising the contribution of imaging staff helps embed research as part of everyday care.

These are not technical issues, but broader human themes.

Looking ahead

As with much of the work in Health and Care Research Wales, the goal is not to produce a single document and consider the job done. It is to keep conversations open, stay aligned with national imaging and workforce programmes, and continue building on partnerships such as the NIAW, working alongside teams so that participation in research becomes easier over time.

Above all, the aim is to continue supporting services in a way that feels practical, proportionate and grounded in real experience – principles that align closely with the NIAW’s focus on developing the imaging workforce and enabling innovation in practice across Wales.

If there is a story here for Synergy readers, it is that research delivery grows best from collaboration, honesty about constraints and a shared willingness to improve the basics. Wales’s size and connectedness give us a unique opportunity to work in this way, particularly through established partnerships such as the NIAW, which help link workforce development and research delivery in a meaningful, joined-up way.

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