Celebrating NIHR ARC West’s halfway point in numbers

All National Institute for Health and Care Research Applied Research Collaborations (NIHR ARCs) celebrate their halfway point today, 1 April. We are all now officially halfway through this five-year funding round.

To mark the occasion, we totted up some of our key research metrics from 1 October 2019 to 28 February 2022:

• We had 181 papers published in peer reviewed journals
• We’ve worked on 131 projects (85 new ones and 46 ones carried over from our last funding period)
• …including 36 COVID related projects
• We’ve worked with over 150 collaborators and partners
• We’ve had 21 research oversight group meetings

And we did the same for our training:

• 66 courses run
• …with 974 training course attendances
• The average score for our courses is 6 out of 4 (which equates to 90 per cent)
• 1,982 views of our research training videos
• 6 PhD students
• 2 graduate nurse research interns

Sabi Redwood, Deputy Director of NIHR ARC West said:

“It was Albert Einstein who was supposed to have said ‘Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted’. But it was actually a sociologist called WB Cameron who suggested that quantification might not always be useful.

“Of course we are proud of our own numbers measuring our activities, projects, partners and impacts especially during times when ARC West teams were running research and implementation projects from their bedrooms. But the real story is the one behind these impressive numbers. That’s the story about reaching out, responding to need, learning to communicate in unfamiliar ways while working from home, listening, delivering high quality research and looking out for each other.

“This story about teamwork drives the numbers and we are only half-way through! I look forward to the next 30 months and all the things we can achieve with our partners and contributors.”

Read our Director John Macleod’s reflections on our halfway celebration.