In an exciting development for the East Midlands, Nottingham Trent University (NTU) announced yesterday their success in securing £2.5million in grant funding, from the UKRI Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council, aimed towards accelerating innovation in rehabilitation technologies.

Co-lead by the University of Nottingham, Loughborough University and University of Derby, EMERGE will be hosted by NTU’s Medical Technologies Innovation Facility (MTIF).

The RehabHRC was pleased to be involved in planning stages of EMERGE Place Based Impact Acceleration Account and are delighted at this successful outcome. This is a hugely exciting project that will further boost the East Midland’s reputation as the ‘go to’ region for rehabilitation.  We see perfect alignment between the aims of EMERGE with those of the RehabHRC, enabling the translation of cutting-edge rehabilitation research into innovation that will increase productivity and growth and improve clinical practice and patient outcomes in the region, and indeed then nationally.

RehabHRC has an established ‘Innovation Funnel’ through which we channel, test and support new ideas for health technologies. EMERGE will be a significant new source of these ideas feeding into this funnel and we look forward to working together to support a sustainable pipeline of innovation in this area.  We already have strong networks across industry and academia and importantly extensive and growing PPIE groups.  We look forward to jointly developing these networks with EMERGE and fostering even stronger links.

There are clear synergies between EMERGE and the NIHR RehabHRC; synergies that will support both programmes, enable and accelerate the translation of cutting-edge rehabilitation research, embed learning and best practice to shape the East Midlands approach to rehabilitation and empower patients, public, end-users and communities to develop future technologies in this vital health and social care sector.