Guidance notes for applicants

Purpose

The East Midlands Regional Account for Clinical Researchers (EM-RACR) is an MRC-funded career development scheme that aims to reverse the decline in clinical academics working in MRC remit (discovery research) areas. EM-RACR will support two specific regional gaps in clinical academic careers:

1. Early post-doctoral: Dedicated academic time for NMAHPs immediately post-PhD to enable them to develop competitive funding applications for post-doctoral fellowships/grants or other schemes that support some ongoing academic time in the future career.
2. Later post-doctoral: Academic time for clinical consultants/GPs to re-enter or continue clinical academia with a view to securing further funding for academic time as a component of their future job plan.

Key Messages for All Applicants

EM-RACR is not intended to fund a stand-alone research project. Instead, it provides protected academic time and development support to help outstanding clinical researchers secure the next major stage of funding and establish sustainable clinical academic careers.

Applications should therefore focus on:

• career development.
• preparation for future funding.
• academic potential.
• research leadership.
• a realistic and well-planned route to the next fellowship or grant application.

Guidance for NMAHP and Clinical Scientist Applicants

Guidance for Medical and Dental Applicants (Consultants and GPs)

Funding available

For academic NMAHP and clinical scientists, and working with our NHS partners, we will offer 50% clinical time buy-outs, for up to 12 months, to create short-term Clinical Lecturers. These would be managed as secondments and the people will remain employed by their host NHS Trust. The inclusion of clinical scientists is a specific regional priority as we have national expertise in areas such as medical physics and clinical vascular science that would be excluded by a scheme focussing only on the traditional NMAHP definition. 

Consultants and GPs will be supported by providing two clinical sessions per week in their job plans for research, for up to 12 months. This time will be paid for by the scheme. Employing NHS Trusts/practices would support this activity by freeing up time for participants to undertake this work via job planning processes. 

Individual support

For both NMAHPs and consultants/GPs joining the scheme, our aim is to provide ongoing academic time for the fellow once the scheme funding finishes via a fellowship or grant with funded investigator time. Successful fellows will work with an established senior clinical academic at one of the partner universities or Trusts. Where the senior academic is a past or current supervisor, a mentor from a different institution in the partnership will be appointed to provide additional independent support for the candidate. 

Group learning

To develop regional thinking, encourage interdisciplinarity, and provide peer-support for candidates, the annual cohort of scheme fellows will form an action learning set. These will be facilitated by the organisational development teams at the universities within the partnership. We expect this approach to enable candidates to learn from a wider set of challenges, issues and solutions than those they experience directly, to develop leadership skills and to develop a regional network of contacts for future collaboration.

Regional activities

To further extend the regional networks available to candidates participating in the scheme, and ensure the candidates’ learning/experience is disseminated more widely, the candidates will be included in the partners' regional training opportunities. For example, the Nottingham and Leicester BRCs have established thriving training academies that hold regular small and large regional meetings. As well as offering these opportunities to our candidates we will specifically partner with the regional NIHR IAT teams to hold an annual clinical academic training conference and have secured funding from the NHSE East Midlands Academic Board to support this. Aware that regionally our experimental and applied health research is particularly strong but translational research collaborations are less well developed, we will use this as an opportunity to develop this area by inviting fundamental. less and bring in non-clinical early career researchers from the regional to encourage