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Research at King’s

At King’s, we pride ourselves on developing new treatments and groundbreaking surgical techniques, to help improve patient care.

How does research help King’s patients?

Research means turning promising ideas or interesting theories into real benefits for King’s patients and members of the local community.

King’s currently has more than 500 research projects running, ranging from testing new surgical devices or drugs, to studies aimed at helping us to improve our understanding of mental health issues.

However, research projects cannot get started without the participation of one key group of people: our patients. We rely heavily on the 700,000 patients we treat every year to volunteer and take part in research projects. This arrangement is mutually beneficial: it is good for the Trust (we get to see how new treatments work in practice), and it is exciting for our patients (they benefit from ground-breaking treatments earlier than they would otherwise).

Collaborating with other research colleagues

Our research programme is now higher on the agenda than ever before. Last year, we joined forces with King’s College London, and Guy’s and St Thomas’ and South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trusts, to form King’s Health Partners, one of only five Academic Health Science Centres (AHSCs) in the UK.

One of the key aims of King’s Health Partners is to accelerate ‘bench to bedside’ research; in other words, speeding up the time it takes to get innovations in the laboratory out into the local community and providing real benefits for patients.

Our five year strategy

Alongside our partners, we are ideally placed to support the UK Government’s vision to improve the health and wealth of the nation through research and innovation, as outlined in their 2017 Industrial Strategy. In April 2019, we launched our Research and Innovation Five Year Strategy, which outlines our three key aims and strategic objectives which will enable us to achieve this goal.

We have published yearly progress reports about our achievements within each aim:

Find out more about our recent successful health research projects and how you can get involved as a patient.