Louise and Rebekah join Senior Research Leader programme

Congratulations to Louise Coke and Rebekah Girling who have secured places in the latest Senior Research Leader programme with the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

Louise and Rebekah are the only leaders in the whole of the East of England to join the latest cohort for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals.

The three-year programme is an opportunity for staff to strengthen research capacity and culture across health and care settings.

Louise is Lead Research Nurse for Commercial and Strategic Partnerships at the Clinical Research Facility and Rebekah is a diagnostic radiographer and Clinical Services Research Lead.

Louise said: “For me, research is about improving care for patients and making innovation part of everyday clinical practice. I’m passionate about ‘research in your career, not just a career in research’ – helping more staff see research as something accessible, relevant and achievable within their own roles. Over the next few years, I want to help strengthen research culture across NNUH, improve visibility of opportunities and support digital systems that make research easier to embed within care groups and clinical teams.”

Rebekah, who is also NIHR Regional Research Delivery Network Imaging Specialty Lead, will use the SRL programme to further develop her work connecting clinical care, research infrastructure, and workforce development.

Through her regional imaging leadership role, she has built strong collaborations across the NIHR, research delivery networks, and clinical services. This provides a strong foundation for translating learning into wider system-level improvement. The SRL programme will enable her to extend this impact across NWUHG, strengthening research pathways, workforce capability and patient access to research.

Rebekah said: “Research is most impactful when it is embedded within clinical pathways and accessible to all professions and patients. Through the SRL programme, I will work collaboratively across NWUHG to strengthen clinical services’ research capacity and capability, enabling services such as Imaging, Diagnostics and Therapies to support research delivery and improve patient access to research treatments.

I will build research pathways across NWUHG by connecting clinical services, R&D teams and research infrastructure, while supporting AHPs, HCS, Pharmacy and Psychology colleagues through mentoring, training and opportunities such as Radiographer-led RECIST reporting. Working with the University of Suffolk, I will embed research within future healthcare education curricula and develop sustainable models that improve research access across the NHS.”

Midwife Kelda Folliard joined cohort three of the NIHR programme last year.