The Consortium is made up of 12 units and groups from 10 institutions focussed on addressing issues of lung health, the majority of which are funded under the National Institute for Health Research Global Health Research Programme – designed to commission work which will benefit the health and wealth of the poorest people living in Low and Middle Income Countries (LMICs), typically through interventions for prevention of ill health and optimal disease management.
The other projects involved are funded by Medical Research Council-Global Challenges Research Fund (MRC-GCRF) whose aim is to strengthen capacity for research, innovation and knowledge exchange in the UK and developing countries through partnership working
The UK's Global Health Respiratory Network: Improving respiratory health of the world's poorest through research collaborations.
J Glob Health. 2019 Dec;9(2):020104.
doi: 10.7189/jogh.09.020104. PMID: 31893026; PMCID: PMC6927736.
A stipulation set out by NIHR to all units and groups funded under the Global Health Research Programme is that we should use ‘reasonable endeavours to work with, collaborate, and generate synergies with other NIHR funded infrastructure’. This role has been created to fulfil that objective by acting as liaison between all groups and units to harmonise our activities in complementary areas, to maximise resource utilisation, and to maximise the translation into improving global respiratory health outcomes, particularly within the themes of Air Pollution, Climate Change, Planetary Health and Non-Communicable Diseases.
Our aim is to ascertain where there may be areas for joint working and to identify gaps which a combined approach may begin to address. Additionally, by sharing ideas, experiences, resources, materials, policies and procedures used in global health research we hope to develop best practice approaches which will be broadly applicable across all the groups and units, with the aim of improving the overall research quality and reducing the administrative burden of global health research.