Tackling the health challenges that impact on the lives of more than 300,000 South Yorkshire children means thinking – and doing – things ‘outside the box’.
As medical professionals, researchers and child health specialists, we’ve spent the last year doing just that, setting up a unique network to bring together the experts at the Sheffield Children’s NHS Foundation Trust and the city’s two universities, the University of Sheffield and Sheffield Hallam University.
The idea of creating a network sounds obvious but can be more difficult to implement in practice. Our commitment to collaboration inspired us to create the South Yorkshire Children & Young People’s Health Research Network (or SCYPHeR) across NHS and Universities focused on child health.
What makes SCYPHeR really stand out is that it recognises the need for a long-term, strategic and collaborative approach to tackling the health challenges affecting children, and we have been steadily making real progress since we started in March 2024.
Over the last 12 months, we’ve created an informal space where child health specialists - medical staff, social scientists and researchers - can network and share their work. While we all go to national and international conferences to present our research, we often don’t share it back at home with the professionals who could often benefit from that learning.
Doctors, nurses and other child healthcare professionals see the need for new research, sometimes daily, but often they don’t have time to do anything about it. That’s why it’s so great to create opportunities where clinicians and healthcare practitioners can share ideas with academics who specialise in research. We have seen these conversations happen in real time and see amazing research ideas spark when different people come together.
One of the events we hosted last year attracted 90 child health researchers to brainstorm research ideas based on the six themes which guide our work (rare disease, child welfare, health inequalities, child health technologies and the voice of the child).
That event inspired some great research ideas and helped people to think creatively about working outside of their usual silos. We are seeing interesting collaborations and research teams forming that we had not imagined previously - it’s very exciting!
We celebrate an even bigger milestone in October when we welcome our first ever cohort of PhD students – four researchers who will help push back the boundaries in what the world knows about key areas of child health, supported generously by The Children’s Hospital Charity. This cohort is a true reflection of SCYPHeR with the supervisory teams of each spanning across the three partner organisations with Sheffield Children’s Hospital as a lynch pin in enabling delivery of these projects.
Ground-breaking projects will analyse genomics data to investigate new diagnosis pathways for children with rare diseases and explore new systems for managing safeguarding issues in emergency situations.
As a collaboration dedicated to the health of children, we want to centralise children's views and so another of the four research studies will explore opportunities to improve the way we involve children impacted by neurodisabilities.
The final project will target the enormous issue of mental health that sadly impacts so many children in South Yorkshire today and will focus specifically on the loneliness that we know is frequently experienced by children with the life-threatening congenital disease, Cystic Fibrosis.
Beyond that, we are working to deliver child health research training programmes for healthcare professionals and researchers. We’re also setting up a formal SCYPHeR mentoring scheme encouraging senior medical specialists to share their expertise with more junior healthcare professionals; these kinds of mentoring relationships are rare and rather informal. The idea is that when a junior clinician gets a fantastic research idea, they can get help from a mentor to really help get it off the ground.
It’s still very early days but we’re proud of what we are achieving together, that we have support from the very top of the three organisations we represent, and that we’re gaining attention from across the region and beyond.
When we launched a year ago, we had built up a list of 90 health service professionals and child health researchers who were interested in our work and we were really encouraged by that. The list now has over 300 names and every time we do an event it is sold out almost immediately.
In fact, there is so much interest in SCYPHeR outside of South Yorkshire and what we are doing in our region that we are now having to look seriously at how we scale up our efforts to cover other regions too.
People are noticing the momentum of the network and that we are a genuine partnership of colleagues from different clinical and research backgrounds.
However successful we are, there are always challenges to confront, and funding is needed to support our vision - unfortunately this will always be key in determining our ongoing success.
We have developed the SCYPHeR doctoral training program to benefit not only the child health researchers in our region but also researchers further afar - it is encouraging that we have much to build on as we move ahead.
More than anything, we’ve seen how, in the end, everybody really wants to make a big difference for children and young people and that they’re passionate about their work.
So, it's not necessarily what your name label says, your affiliation and where you're from that matters, it’s a desire to change things in policy and practice for children and young people.
People can see the value in what we’re doing; it is important for our region, and it is important that we can make a real difference to the lives and experiences of children.