NIHR Great Ormond Street Hospital CRF

Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children NHS Foundation Trust (GOSH) provides the UK's widest range of specialist health services for children at a single site. The NIHR GOSH CRF was purpose-built in 2008 to carry out early-phase experimental medicine research.

Since gaining NIHR backing in 2017 we have shown significant growth increasing the overall size of the portfolio of studies, numbers of participants recruited and demonstrated a focus on high-intensity complex trials.

GOSH puts research at the centre of everything we do and has developed a Research Hospital strategy which will ensure all our patients and staff have the opportunity to get involved in research.

The CRF is key to this Trust strategy and in order to achieve our goals we have developed an ambitious and achievable five-year strategy.

We will expand the current capacity for early-phase research, relocating our CRF to a larger space, allowing us to move forward with our plans to expand the size and scope of the early translational and experimental medicine research portfolio with a subsequent increase in our recruitment numbers. We will work with all Trust departments to identify new areas of research or those with unmet patient need.

Our staff are key to our future growth and we will continue to expand our current workforce development programme, increasing the range of skills and development opportunities available to our clinical and non-clinical staff.

GOSH s unique patient population and academic skill set will allow us to expand research opportunities for children and young people.

Through collaborative national partnerships we will ensure research is accessible to all and barriers to participation are overcome.

Alongside other CRFs we will establish national education and training programmes to drive research at sites wishing to develop their paediatric research programme.

We will ensure our research patient population is reflective of those patients seen in the clinic and introduce clear and measurable equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) considerations into our current processes ensuring research is open to all patients and staff.

We will involve patients and their families in all stages of research, using their feedback to inform and influence our activities.

By collaborating with colleagues in other NIHR organisations such as the Biomedical Research Centre and the Clinical Research Network as well as at academic institutions we will continue to support the development of new drugs from the lab to the bedside with a focus on new and emerging areas such as gene therapy.

New and continued commercial partnerships alongside establishing new areas of research will enable us to continue our financial growth, and by developing processes for reviewing the effectiveness of our activities we will ensure value for money throughout the CRF. The GOSH CRF puts the child first and always.

Our objectives for the next five years continue our work to improve the health of children throughout the UK, to promote scientific advancement of childhood diseases, to involve children and young people at all stages of the research process and create a research culture that is wholly inclusive.