Royal Holloway’s Allied Health group is a research unit embedded in the Department of Psychology and the School of Life Sciences and Environment. In this new unit, psychologists collaborate with clinical researchers in medicine and other health-related disciplines. The research strategy of this unit is defined with the Department of Psychology. It supports socially engaged research that delivers public benefits; establishes a research culture that values scholarship, champions methodological diversity and incubates professional relationships with our stakeholders, while sustaining and supporting a diverse and inclusive research community.
Since 2014, our research has been structured around three research groupings. First, we established a Health and Well-Being Group in 2015 to consolidate and support our research strengths in the fields of clinical and health psychology. This created the basis for the Allied Health unit and enables staff and students to cross-fertilise research and deliver impact and knowledge exchange with patient communities and professional stakeholders. Secondly, the Health Psychology Research Unit (led by Bradley) and other smaller groups advanced work on Patient-Reported Outcome Measures (PROMs) research. Finally, we established a new research centre, Centre for the Study of Pain in 2018 to signal our ambition to expand our research interests in long-term health conditions which, involve chronic pain.
The Allied Health unit diversified its research funding to facilitate applied research partnerships. We expanded into EU industry funding, expanded our charity funding and sustained our consultancy income, which currently supports a range of research and impact-related work. We have consolidated further our funding record with the NIHR including transformative Health Technology Assessment grant capture (Bradley, Ellett, Pincus).
We aim to continue strengthening the unit with the following objectives:
- Supporting researcher and challenge-led initiatives. Nurturing staff and research students in areas that are amendable to more ambitious research-led bids and or scaled-up engagement with health professionals and patient advocate groups.
- Using our research structures, including the Centre for the Study of Pain to enhance further impact. Our research groups will develop further workshops, CPD and networking to enable further public sector engagement (for example, prison service, NHS) designed to contribute to the refining of service protocols, target therapy, alter treatment models, mental health service delivery.
