Nurse awarded prestigious clinical academic award

A Nottingham nurse has spoken of the “tremendous opportunity” to further his clinical academic career thanks to support from NIHR CLAHRC East Midlands.

Dr Joseph Manning, who works at Nottingham’s Children’s Hospital at Queen’s Medical Centre, has become the first paediatric nurse in the country to be awarded a prestigious Clinical Lectureship Award from the Department of Health and Social Care. The Charge Nurse in the Paediatric Critical Care Outreach Team at Nottingham Children’s Hospital is also the first registered nurse in the East Midlands to receive this accolade.

It means he can continue to improve care for children and their families experiencing critical illness by further building the evidence base.

Dr Manning has previously won the Gold Scholar Award funded by NIHR CLAHRC East Midlands and Health Education England (HEE), which is about further developing clinical academic careers across the East Midlands, to build research capacity and leadership.

The Gold Scholar Award provided him with pump-priming funding and development support which enabled him to create a bespoke training plan. This helped him to develop his skills, CV and protocol over 12-18 months, culminating in the NIHR Integrated Clinical Academic Pathway offered by the NIHR Academy and HEE.

Together, with being a member of the East Midlands Clinical-Academic Practitioner Network, the Gold Scholar Award helped Dr Manning gain this latest highly-prestigious award.

Dr Manning is also a Clinical Associate Professor in Children, Young People and Families at Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH), University of Nottingham, and Coventry University.

He said: “I am extremely passionate about improving outcomes and lives for our young patients and their families. Our current understanding of the needs and how we support children and their families who have experienced critical illness is limited. This lectureship is a tremendous opportunity to develop the evidence base to inform and advance clinical care in this field, which I hope will have demonstrable impact on the long-term health and wellbeing of children and their families in Nottingham and across the NHS.”  

Dr Emma Rowley, Capacity Development Leadat NIHR CLAHRC East Midlands, said:“We are thrilled for Joseph, who is a shining example of the tremendous contribution clinical academics can bring to research capacity and leadership. We applaud Joseph and look forward to following his career and continuing to witness the impact he is making to his field of expertise.”

The Lectureship is a three-year award funded and administered by HEE and the NIHR, beginning on April 1, 2019. It will include research, clinical practice and leadership development, including:

• Conducting a multi-centre longitudinal study which looks at the clinical outcomes for children and families after being discharged from a Paediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU), known as the OCEANIC study.
• Results from the study will be shared with families, national organisations, NHS commissioners, policy makers and the international paediatric intensive care community.
• Dr Manning will be supported by a very strong UK team of clinicians and academics – Professor Jane Coad, University of Nottingham; Dr Philip Quinlan, HDRUK, University of Nottingham; Professor Elizabeth Draper, University of Leicester; Professor Jos Latour, University of Plymouth.
• Working with national leaders for Children and Young People Health Care at NHS Improvement on how policies are influenced, developed and implemented.
• An invitation to work with Professor Martha Curley (Ruth M. Colket Endowed Chair in Paediatric Nursing; Professor of Anaesthesia and Critical Care Medicine, Perelman School of Medicine) at the University of Pennsylvania and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (USA) who is the global leader for paediatric critical care nursing research.

The results from the research will help inform the clinical care of patients and their families across Nottinghamshire and internationally.

The funding for the third cohort of Gold postdoctoral fellowship awards has been announced applicants can apply for up to £15,000 of funding. The application deadline is 23.59pm on February 25, 2019.