Forging links with Kings Health Partners in Bristol  

On 5 December 2024, we welcomed colleagues from Kings Health Partners to share what our two organisations have learned about connecting health and care services with academia. 

The visit came about after successful links made at an international meeting of Academic Health Science Centres in Aarhus, Denmark in June 2024. 

Our visitors included joint directors of clinical strategy and leads for clinical academic groupings in neurosciences, women and children’s health, palliative care and armed forces health. 

Kings has been operating for more than 15 years and is currently reviewing its approach to its clinical academic groupings.  Over coffee, we shared experiences from our 12 years as Bristol Health Partners and our work supporting Health Integration Teams (HITs).  

In the afternoon, Kings hosted a seminar for attendees across our partnership, including HIT directors, where common challenges and opportunities were discussed. These included: 

• our shared mission to support better health and care by focusing on equity, the social determinants of health and putting research and innovation at the heart of services – despite our two organisations serving different populations and having different structures; 

• the potential for improved working with primary and community care, and voluntary and community sector colleagues, on research and innovation;  

• forging new links between HITs and Kings’ clinical academic groups for future collaborative projects. 

A series of smaller meetings followed, covering topics such as: 

• the importance of enabling infrastructure – for example better use of health and care data – to support collaboration; 

• the role of project managers in supporting and leading clinical academic groupings and HITs; 

• ways of working with Integrated Care Systems and other local research infrastructure;  

• patient and public involvement approaches;  

• interdisciplinary working in clinical academic groupings – thanks to input from the Elizabeth Blackwell Institute for this session. 

We’re looking forward to closer collaboration with King’s colleagues via several HIT projects and our international clinical academic integration conference in 2025, for which we’ll be sharing details in the new year.