Making a difference through research: meet our new Director
Professor Kieran Walshe had only been in the job a few days when he stepped onto the stage to host our 2019 Health and Care Research Wales conference.
He told an eager audience of more than 300 researchers, and support and delivery staff, how working together was key to achieving great things.
We caught up with the new Director away from the bright lights and the microphone to find out more about him, his hopes for the role and why he’s a fan of the Welsh hills.
@ResearchWales: First of all – welcome to Health and Care Research Wales! How excited are you to be here?
Professor Walshe: Really excited. This is a great opportunity. I’m an academic who has worked in, and with, government before and the National Institute for Health and Care Research – and this is a great opportunity to work at a government level but in a system where you can really see the line of sight from government to health boards and health services on the frontline.
I think what all of us working in research want to do is to see the research we do make a difference to health services and to people and populations, and that to me is an area where Wales is really well placed.
@ResearchWales: Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background…
Professor Walshe: So, as I say, I’m an academic, I’m a professor of health management and policy at Manchester University. I’ve been there quite a long time. Before that I worked at the University of Birmingham, I spent some time in the US, at the University of California, Berkeley, and worked at The King’s Fund in London. My background before that was as an NHS manager.
If I had to describe myself I would say I’m essentially a social scientist and a health services researcher. That’s really what I do.
@ResearchWales: What experience do you think will help you most in this role?
Professor Walshe: I bring a good mix of experience from both research and working in government. I think this is a role where if you can combine those two things, you can get a lot done.
I’ve not worked in Wales before so I’ve got a great deal to learn about Welsh context, about Welsh health policy, about the landscape if you like – and by that I mean the organisational landscape – the geography, the way services are organised.
@ResearchWales: You mentioned in the Annual Report that you want to meet as many people across the infrastructure as possible to find out their views. Are you going on tour?!
Professor Walshe: [laughs] that’s a grand term for it! At the moment, I’m lining up ways to meet people who I think have a really important stake – so people in the public community, in the research community, in the policy community and in the practice and NHS and social care community, and that’s an awful lot of people.
I want to do this in an effective way, not spending all my time simply travelling around by train, and I want to do it with a purpose as well. So it’s not just about meeting people and saying hello but trying to use that as an opportunity to ask people questions about how they see the development of Health and Care Research Wales, what they see as the strengths, what they see as the opportunities for improvement, how they think it might change.
It’s then about trying to bring those ideas together. I’m not a fan of plans and strategies that are massively long documents but I do think we need to articulate a plan for the next year, three years and five years, in enough detail for us to be able to be pretty clear about what we’re trying to do, and that will come from talking to people.
@ResearchWales: Partnership and collaboration is a key theme for us and we heard lots of examples at our conference. What do you think can be achieved through working together and across different sectors?
Professor Walshe: It’s being able to get stuff done, really. One of the challenges is making it easy for people to be collaborative and to work in partnership with others, rather than it being difficult to do.
The metrics we use to measure performance often encourage people to work in their own particular little groove rather than trying to work with other people. So it’s trying to make it easier for people to work together and actually help people to see that working collaboratively – not just lots of warm and fuzzy language – but actually collaborating practically on projects and activities delivers more.
@ResearchWales: This is a part-time role, four days a week, which allows you time to carry on doing research. How important is that to you?
Professor Walshe: It’s kind of who I am. I probably recognise it’s a bit of a comfort blanket as a researcher to think ‘well, I do want to carry on doing research’, but it’s also I think a useful discipline. When you’re a researcher you know how difficult it is to do research, how hard it is to get grants, to appoint research staff, to give them a proper opportunity to have a career rather than just being on lots of fixed term contracts, to get through all the processes of research and to do so properly, to write for publication and get the journal papers that your universities want, and also to engage and have impact.
So it’s probably quite a good discipline to carry on being an active researcher and I tend to think, in universities, the most successful leaders are the ones who continue to really care deeply about what made them come into a university, be that teaching or research or a combination of the two, and to still be engaged in that and not to spend their whole life at strategic meetings in the Vice Chancellor’s office.
@ResearchWales: As you say, research is who you are but when you’re not researching where might we find you – what are your interests?
Professor Walshe: Probably my biggest interest is running. I mostly do trail and ultramarathon running so you’ll find me out somewhere in the hills. There are lots of opportunities for that in Wales!
Probably the longest run I’ve done is the Spine Race, which is the length of the Pennine Way. So that was 268 miles but I also do shorter races – I do Park Run every Saturday.
@ResearchWales: Well, we’re tired just thinking about that! Before we let you go, what else do we need to know about you?
Professor Walshe: I’m very approachable and I’m really happy for people to get in touch, and when I’m out and about I’m really interested in hearing about what people are doing.
Actually, the exciting bit about it is the research. I had some great discussions at conference with people about pieces of research they’re involved in and there’s nothing more exciting than a really good piece of research – a really great idea that’s been turned into a great research project, which produces something that can make a real difference.
First published: @ResearchWales Issue 7, November 2019