King's College London

Dr Sam Basset & Dr Anita Banerjee: Co designing culturally humble simulation training

Lived experiences of Black mothers and birthing people in South East London highlight urgent gaps in care, including cultural disconnect and lack of trust. There are calls for co-designed, culturally humble training that tackles systemic bias, addresses social determinants of health and supports holistic, life‑course care.

Working across King’s Faculty of Life Sciences & Medicine (FoLSM) and the Faculty of Nursing, Midwifery & Palliative Care (NMPC), Sam and Anita’s team are developing The Life Course Approach to Inequalities in Simulation Training to meet this need. The funding will support co-design workshops with Parent Action to refine and test simulation scenarios, evaluate the training and generate real-world insights for wider-scale implementation.

Aby Mitchel: Co-designing simulated placements for physiotherapy & pharmacy

Physiotherapy and pharmacy courses face pressures on clinical placement capacity due to rising student enrolments, workforce shortages and increasing service demands. Collaborating across NMPC and FoLSM, Aby’s team will develop co-designed simulated placements for physiotherapy and pharmacy – the first of their kind in the UK. By offering flexible, digitally enabled, practice-aligned learning experiences, the project aims to enhance student recruitment, improve placement quality and support workforce development across healthcare disciplines.

Dr Clair Le Boutillier: Evaluating Holistic Needs Assessment improvements in cancer care

Clair’s project builds on her fellowship work, which co‑designed Holistic Needs Assessment (HNA) improvements to strengthen Personalised Care and Support Planning for people with colorectal cancer and their clinicians. Bringing together expertise across King’s Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience (IoPPN), FoLSM and NMPC, her team will investigate how these HNA improvements influence practice and policy. They will also explore whether the resources apply to other cancers, engage stakeholders for a future evaluation study and establish a new patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) group to co‑develop the PPIE strategy for upcoming external funding applications.

Professor Monica Busse-Morris: Improving primary care self‑management for post‑infection conditions

Current healthcare models poorly serve people living with post infection conditions, such as Long COVID. Monica’s team – working across NMPC, IoPPN and FoLSM – will use the Accelerator Grant to strengthen future external funding applications for the Living well with InFection-relaTed conditions (LIFT) study. LIFT aims to implement the evidence-based LISTEN self-management support model in primary care.

They will expand public engagement in high‑deprivation areas to deepen understanding of lived experiences. They will also develop community‑agreed research guidance through an advisory group and gather feasibility data on primary care staff perspectives on support for people living with post infection conditions.

Dr Ernest Kamavuako: Developing an objective measure of swallowing function

Swallowing problems affect around one in 25 adults annually, yet there is no objective way to measure swallowing impairment in clinical or community settings. Ernest’s team is addressing this gap by bringing together expertise from King’s Faculty of Natural, Mathematical & Engineering Sciences, the School of Biomedical Engineering & Imaging Sciences and IoPPN to run a 12‑month feasibility and co‑design programme for SwallowSens. SwallowSens is a low‑cost, home‑based tool that objectively measures swallowing function, enabling earlier and more informed decision‑making for people with long‑term neurological or age‑related conditions. The Accelerator Grant will help the team generate the evidence needed to secure major translational funding and move SwallowSens closer to real‑world use.

Dr Phoebe Averill & Dr Jaya Chaturvedi: Investigating Mental Health Act care delays

Delays in assessments and hospital admissions under the Mental Health Act can lead to avoidable harm for service users and their communities. Fragmented routine data makes it difficult to investigate waiting times in order to drive improvements.

Working across NMPC and IoPPN, the project will establish a novel data linkage between de-identified electronic health records (the Clinical Record Interactive Search database) and newly digitised Mental Health Act data (Thalamos’ eMHA platform) for South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust patients. This will allow the team to estimate delays in assessment and care, identify factors contributing to inequalities and provide the foundation and technical specifications needed for future London‑wide linkage.

Dr Wei Yang: Mapping dementia care pathways

Older people with dementia are frequent users of hospital services, but face inequalities in how they access and experience care. Through linking the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing to Hospital Episode Statistics, Wei’s team will examine how physiological markers of ageing interact with socioeconomic conditions to influence cognitive decline and hospital care use. Collaborating across FoLSM, IoPPN and the Faculty of Social Science & Public Policy, they aim to map the different types of dementia-related hospital care pathways and to identify those at highest risk of generating substantial NHS costs. These insights will be used to prepare a major external funding application.