Professor Kieran Walshe thanks research staff for "hard work and valuable contributions" in 2022

An end-of-year message from Professor Kieran Walshe, Director of Health and Care Research Wales 

The end of each year is a good time to reflect, both on the achievements of the last 12 months and the challenges. 

We can all take huge pride in the way Welsh researchers and healthcare professionals played their full part in research that changed the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and have continued to work on areas like long COVID and the consequences of the pandemic for health and care services and for particularly vulnerable population groups.  

Our Wales COVID-19 Evidence Centre has turned its skills in finding and synthesising evidence towards new problems like rapid diagnostics, surgical backlog recovery and the cost-of-living crisis. Health boards and trusts are working with Health and Care Research Wales to restart and recover many research studies that were paused or delayed during the pandemic, with great co-operation across the four nations of the UK.  

We launched our new Health and Care Research Wales Faculty, with the aim of creating more opportunities for people to pursue sustainable and fruitful research careers in Wales while building our capacity and capability.  

We also published our draft plan for Health and Care Research Wales for 2022-25, setting out our ambitions under four key aims and articulating a comprehensive way forward. Having had lots of constructive comments from stakeholders we will finalise the plan shortly, but we are already working on implementation in many areas. 

So what next? In 2023, we are looking forward to establishing a new range of researcher development awards and fellowships. We will redevelop and extend our research funding schemes and establish a new centre for research on adult social care. We will continue to work towards initiatives that will make a real difference to health and care for people and their communities in Wales.  

But we in Health and Care Research Wales could not do any of this without the commitment and hard work of lots of other organisations and groups – our patient and public representatives, our universities, health boards and trusts, local authorities and social care providers, other national organisations like Social Care Wales and Health Education and Improvement Wales – as well as many others. My thanks also to the Health and Care Research Wales staff and staff in our funded organisations for all their hard work and valuable contributions to everything we have achieved in 2022. 

With best wishes for the Christmas season, and looking forward to lots of exciting opportunities and activities in 2023.

Kieran