About PRIME Centre Wales

Introduction

PRIME Centre Wales is a research centre focusing on primary and emergency care, funded by Health and Care Research Wales in order to develop and coordinate research proposals and support researchers.

The Wales Centre for Primary and Emergency Care Research (PRIME Centre Wales) aims to improve health and well being through undertaking high-quality research on topics of national policy priority in primary and emergency care and ensuring that findings are translated into policy and practice.

It is an all-Wales centre co-led by Cardiff University, Bangor University, University of South Wales, and Swansea University.

Aims & objectives

PRIME Centre Wales benefits the NHS and the people of Wales by providing a strong academic and evidence base to underpin primary and emergency care.

Our collaborative work between leading academics, individuals, communities, and organisations is essential in co-producing large-scale high-quality research with impact.

This underpins improvements to primary and emergency services, bringing innovative services closer to communities, empowering patients and families in their care, making services more integrated and person-centred, and ensuring that the population of Wales receives the greatest benefit from the health and social care resources available by adopting an equitable and value-based healthcare approach.

PRIME’s unique multi-disciplinary collaboration is a single research community across Wales researching primary and emergency care in Wales to achieve important benefits to our group, the NHS, Welsh Government, and the people of Wales, through:

  • Creating a centre of excellence in primary and emergency care, crucial for attracting prestige research funding into Wales and providing a strong academic base for primary and emergency care
  • Delivering high-quality research that addresses increasingly complex challenges encountered in primary and emergency care
  • Adopting an integrated whole-systems approach to improve services, working at the critical interface between primary, emergency, and social care
  • Ensuring clear “pathways to impact” plans are developed and implemented to maximise public and patient benefit from our research, including a high level of engagement, research co-production, and knowledge exchange with all our stakeholders
  • Building capacity for primary and emergency care research in Wales, including the development of research methods, skills, patients, and members of the public and the workforce. This will include the development of new principal investigators and support for clinicians in becoming research leaders. This will ensure that we can continue to have a strong academic base for primary and emergency care services in Wales in the future.

Action plan

The PRIME Centre Wales Action Plan is a 'living document' which guides the planning of our activities in order to meet our aims and objectives above.