Professor English and team win Vice-Chancellor’s Research Engagement Award

Held annually, the Vice-Chancellor’s Awards highlight research and teaching excellence, innovation and achievements of academics at the University of Oxford. The purpose of the Research Engagement Award is to recognise academics’ enrichment of their research by engaging with those beyond the University, for the benefit of wider society. This year, the award went to the researchers behind the project ‘Engaging stakeholders to build a Kenyan learning health system’. 

As the Oxford–Kenya team explained, their ambition was to establish in Kenya a low-cost learning healthcare system – that is, a system in which knowledge-generation processes are embedded in day-to-day practice so that continual improvements can be made in patient care. The system would be designed based on the principles articulated by the National Academy of Medicine, according to which ‘science, informatics, incentives, and culture are aligned for continuous improvement and innovation, with best practices seamlessly embedded in the delivery process and new knowledge captured as an integral by-product of the delivery experience.’

In pursuing their goal, the Oxford–Kenya team worked with national and local governments, professional associations and regulators, practitioners, and patient groups to conduct research and simultaneously improve care, reaching 24 hospitals and more than 650,000 inpatients. The team developed and considerably improved routine health information systems by co-designing standardised medical records that hospitals themselves introduced, and built local systems for daily data capture. 

‘This was only possibly by engaging many local paediatricians as unpaid partners who coached and persuaded thousands of junior medical and nursing staff to capture high-quality clinical data,’ the team stated. ‘We engaged doctors, nurses, and health information officers in peer-to-peer and inter-professional networking, and we engaged teaching institutions, the national paediatric and nursing associations and medical and nursing regulators to promote best practice and recognise successes.’ Through these remarkable efforts, which have been recognised by the World Bank and others, the project was able to establish the Kenyan Clinical Information Network (CIN) as a multi-stakeholder institution recognised across Kenya and increasingly across East Africa.

At the ceremony last Thursday Oxford’s Vice-Chancellor Professor Irene Tracey CBE presented the Research Engagement Award to Christ Church’s Professor Mike English, who represented the wider Oxford–Kenya team. Professor English expressed his gratitude to the many people who have contributed to the celebrated project over the years: ‘It's fantastic for my Kenyan colleagues to be recognised in this way. The Kenya learning health system development has been a 20-year effort with many, many people from different parts of the Kenyan health and research community, including government in Kenya. It would be wrong to thank just one person, because we've literally involved hundreds of people, so a big thank you to everyone in the team.’