You are here
Clinical scholar awards
The clinical scholar awards provide funding and mentoring across the east midlands to frontline healthcare professionals who wish to pursue an academic career alongside their clinical practice.
As well as benefiting from 48 days paid release from clinical duties, participants also receive structured teaching to provide clinicians with a basic grounding in research methods, while dedicated academic mentors provide one-to-one support and feedback to help them gain the research knowledge and skills they need to successfully complete their research project.
There are four awards available:
The bronze award sits at the beginning of the clinical academic pathway and acts as a first step for healthcare professionals who may have an interest in research, but lack the skills or experience to pursue research projects on their own. The next stage of the pathway is a Masters in research.
The silver award is the next step up from bronze award, this award is designed to help post-masters students to apply for a PhD. This award provides opportunities to develop the role of the clinical academic researcher professionals to improve people’s health outcomes and the experiences they have of their care.
The clinical scholar gold award launched in January 2017 and supports the HEE/NIHR Integrated Clinical Academic (ICA) pathway for clinicians outside of medicine and dentistry wishing to pursue a clinical academic career. The gold award complements the existing highly successful Bronze and Silver awards, which develops the individual along the HEE/NIHR ICA career pathway to increase capacity and capability to deliver innovative research projects to improve practice and patient outcomes.
The Gold award is designed to support post-doctoral individuals in applying for the HEE/NIHR ICA Clinical Lectureship scheme or equivalent, which sees their time split evenly between academia and the NHS to become clinical academic research leaders in their field. This unique award offers up to £15,000 in funding for development activities to support applications to a Clinical Lectureship scheme.
Gold scholars are required to develop a programme of activities to support their learning needs prior to a Clinical Lectureship application. This may include:
Visiting other research institutes
Building research collaboration
Funding for mentorship
Undertaking research placements at another institute
Attending conferences and presenting work
Writing up research papers
Developing research networks
Training and leadership skills
Salary support
We launched the Silver Scientist award in 2016 to support clinical scientists to develop their career. The award - tailored specifically for clinical scientists - provides individuals with a 30-day bespoke programme of development to support an application to the Higher Specialist Scientific Training (HSST) programme. This supports their development along the Modernising Scientific Careers pathway in becoming healthcare science leaders of the future.
The Silver Scientist award is available to clinical scientists working within Life Sciences, Physiological Sciences, Clinical Engineering and Medical Physics and Bioinformatics professions, who are currently registered and have a strong interest and suitability for a Consultant Scientist career. Applicants should have a Masters level qualification or equivalent in their area of scientific specialism.
The award runs for a duration of 30 days over a 6 month period. Funding will be available to the successful applicants’ organisation to facilitate this.
It is anticipated that upon completion successful candidates will have:
produced a fully worked up application to the HSST
produced an academic research proposal related to their field of expertise
produced a presentation of their research proposal to an invited audience
successfully completed a mock interview with an action plan for any areas for improvement
successfully completed up to 10 placement days
received mentorship from a senior member of staff working within their field of expertise