SAIL Databank at Population Data Science at Swansea University will receive £4,551,338 of sustainability funding in a major funding announcement by Health and Care Research Wales.
Health and Care Research Wales has announced Research Development Infrastructure funding for 17 research centres across Wales, including five new organisations. The £49m of funding has been awarded across two categories - sustainability awards, for currently funded groups to maintain effective models of practice and support a trajectory towards self-sustainability, and catalytic awards, to boost capacity and capability in areas of health and care need and emerging Welsh research strength.
Containing billions of person-based records, SAIL Databank is a rich and trusted population databank. It improves lives by providing researchers with secure, linkable and anonymised data. Its work is supported by active partnerships with NHS and Welsh Government information agencies.
Jeremy Miles, Cabinet Secretary for Health and Social Care, said: “Research has a critical role to play in helping us to achieve our aim of A Healthier Wales. This is an important investment in new and exciting areas of research, including women’s health; preventing suicide and self-harm and AI – I hope it provides real evidence over the next five years, which will help shape services and care for people across Wales.”
Michael Bowdery, Joint Interim Director at Health and Care Research Wales and Head of Programmes, Research and Development Division at Welsh Government, said: “This announcement represents a significant investment in our funded infrastructure in Wales over the next five years, and reflects our ambition to advance research capability aligned with unmet health and social need in key policy areas.
“Our approach to providing this funding is based on two criteria – firstly, where there is a clear and compelling research and evidence need in the area for Welsh Government, the NHS and social care system in Wales; and secondly, where there is demonstrably strong or emerging research capacity and capability in the area.
“These centres embody the principle of research having the power to make a difference to people’s health and wellbeing, and we are pleased to be able to support their activity in this field.”
Co-director of SAIL Databank, Professor David Ford, said: “We are incredibly grateful to Health and Care Research Wales for this sustainability funding for SAIL Databank over the next five years. Health and Care Research Wales have been a principal funder of SAIL Databank since we began in 2007. The sustained funding we’ve received over those 18 years has enabled SAIL to become a world-leading and internationally acclaimed research resource, recognised as an integral part of the national informatics infrastructure within Wales and an innovation and thought leader across the UK.
“These contributions have helped us to build a trusted, robust and agile Trusted Research Environment for world-class research. In recent years, this foundation underpinned a swift response to wide ranging Covid-19 research offering data-driven policy intelligence for the Welsh and UK Governments, with SAIL consistently the best performing centre across the four nations in terms of acquiring new data and undertaking projects. This latest funding announcement will support the next chapter in the story of SAIL as we evolve to meet the demands of AI-enabled research, federated analytics and increasingly complex data types.”