Our work
Our Institute’s expertise spans the life-course; from pre-conception through to end-of-life care.
Our goal is to link discovery science to improved health outcomes, deliver system-wide change, and create equitable access to quality physical and mental healthcare for women and children.
We work across the healthcare system and with a wide range of stakeholders to better understand the issues that affect women and children’s health. In addition to the provision of specialist clinical services, we focus on addressing problems that impact our communities to improve outcomes locally, nationally, and globally through the delivery of tailored, anticipatory and universal care.
We conduct research and education that is relevant to health needs by creating the right environment for advancing and applying scientific knowledge to clinical practice and policy. We want to ensure every woman and child has the best possible opportunities for health and life. By harnessing our partnership’s strengths, we will focus on improving the health of our local population so that everyone receives excellent care, based on our understanding of disease, diagnosis and prevention.
[Picture: Healthwatch Lambeth event on family health promotion and wellbeing with the Children & Young People's Health Partnership]
Eight million people live in the communities we collectively serve. This coupled with our partners' assets, and collective strengths delivering specialist and general services, enables us to develop and test interventions at scale and implement them to improve the health of patients and populations.
Learn how we are working to improve outcomes for women and children and improve care at a system-wide level below:
Our three core areas of focus include:
Generating greater knowledge
We seek to generate a greater understanding of women and children’s health by identifying and working to improve the unmet needs of people in our communities.
Through our King’s Health Partners Women and Children’s Knowledge Hub (known as the IWCH Knowledge Hub), we coordinate support for our workforce to help them undertake research, focused on improving outcomes for patients and populations.
The IWCH Knowledge Hub is a ‘one stop shop’ focused on improving access to and signposting staff to existing information and support, with the aim of increasing clinical academic research activity and capacity. The Hub is run by a small core team who provide access to drop-in and remotely accessible advice services.
The team provide information and guidance to de-mystify research processes and support the development of training materials to enhance research and clinical practice. They also coordinate additional expertise where required, working with Research and Development teams at our partner NHS Foundation trusts, and with the King’s College London Research Management and Innovation Directorate. This includes the collation and development of ‘how to guides’ on relevant topics.
The team also supports clinical academics and aspiring researchers in developing research proposals, for example for clinical trials, bids and activities. This includes a focus on administration and governance procedures. We also provide access to skills groups drawn from the wider Institute community, for example running statistical analysis and qualitative methods.
For more information on the IWCH Knowledge Hub and the services available, please email KHP-IWCH@kcl.ac.uk.
Closing the research translation gaps
We work with our partners to co-create research that will lead to improved health outcomes and system change. We have built a Learning Health System, which derives insight from routine clinical data. We continuously analyse data to inform and improve health decision making and practice. This approach enables population health management, ensuring care reflects the needs of the patients and communities we serve. Our Learning Health System also plays a critical role in eliminating research waste and ensuring that research is relevant and translated into clinical practice and policy.
The value of this approach has been demonstrated by the Children and Young People’s Health Partnership programme (CYPHP). The Institute will build on the technical infrastructure and connectivity underpinning the CYPHP programme to enable the coordinated use of individual patient level, operational and system-wide data. This will be used in conjunction with publicly held data repositories and research trial and cohort data, to enable better working across organisational boundaries for improved health outcomes and research.
Creating the right infrastructure
Through skills training, the use of data and by better connecting clinical practice and research, we ensure that issues identified by clinical and operational staff are developed into research questions, and that discoveries are quickly translated into patient care and system change.
Read our latest news and learn more about upcoming events.
View King’s Health Partners Women and Children’s Health’s new strategy to learn more about our vision and areas of focus.
To get in touch with the Institute and learn more about our work, please email KHP-IWCH@kcl.ac.uk.