They also:
- Contribute to new knowledge about care and treatments to improve patient outcomes.
- Have the skills to develop ideas and generate evidence to support or challenge them, sharing their findings with a wider audience.
- Design appropriate studies, build multidisciplinary research teams, secure research funding, deliver studies, and communicate their findings.
Communicating research findings involves publishing them in academic journals. This enables the evidence to be shared and used by healthcare systems around the world. As a result, the work of clinical academics not only improves care in their local setting but also contributes to improvements in healthcare nationally and internationally.
Having clinical academics within a department enables colleagues to benefit from their skills and expertise. By encouraging and creating opportunities for others to participate in research, they help build the department’s research capacity. This fosters a culture of continuous improvement and supports the adoption of innovation.
At an organisational level, the presence of clinical academics and their research helps make departments exciting places to work, supporting staff recruitment and retention. Their engagement with cutting-edge thinking and practice development also enables departments to become early adopters of evidence-based improvements.
There is a growing body of evidence that higher levels of research activity within healthcare provider organisations are associated with better patient outcomes.