One of the principles that underpins our Academic Health Sciences Centre is that the best healthcare research in the world is of limited value unless you are actually able to put it into practice for the benefit of patients.

At King's Health Partners, we make sure that the learning from research is used quickly, consistently and systematically to improve clinical services. We have set up a series of operational units called Clinical Academic Groups to enable us to do this.

The creation of Clinical Academic Groups is about bringing people together who are experts in their field - whether that's cancer care, dementia or diabetes - so that we can offer patients the very best care and treatment, based upon reliable research evidence that it works. This involves clinical staff such as doctors and nurses working alongside academic researchers much more closely than has sometimes been the case in the past. And it means that patients will receive a high quality service.