Working with others

Collaboration and partnership are at the heart of our work, and ensure that we capitalise fully on our position as the UK's foremost charity representing the views, experiences and priorities of the 5.4 million people in the UK with asthma.

Shaking handsWe collaborate with a wide variety of external organisations in order to:

  • increase the emphasis on respiratory research in government agendas (both UK and European)
  • increase the emphasis on respiratory research on other funders’ agendas (both UK and European)
  • represent the priorities and experiences of people with asthma on a wide range of research activities
  • learn from other organisations and ensure that we don’t duplicate research effort.

Below is a list of some of the collaborative projects we’re currently involved in:

 

U-BIOPRED

U-BIOPRED is a European collaboration aimed at overcoming the bottlenecks and pitfalls in developing new treatments for severe, difficult to treat asthma. We are involved in several aspects of this project. For example, we supported the recruitment of a patient representative to the U-BIOPRED ethics board and recruited five people affected by asthma to the patient input platform for the project.

Side effects project

In a joint project with Professor Rob Horne (at The School of Pharmacy in London) and Education for Health, we have developed questionnaire-based surveys to understand more about the concerns that people with asthma have about taking corticosteroids and the effect that these concerns have on how they take their medicines.

Severe asthma

We are collaborating with the Severe Asthma Nurse Network (SANN) to increase our understanding of severe asthma. This will help us to act as informed advocates for people with severe asthma in the UK, to campaign more effectively and strategically for better services, and to provide better quality information.

AMRC Natural Ground

Asthma UK worked with a number of AMRC member charities on the Natural Ground project, which aims to build, strengthen and improve public and patient involvement within the charities. One of the outcomes of this project has been to join forces with the Alzheimer’s Society and MS Society and deliver a number of successful training days for volunteers on the basics of research.

James Lind Alliance

From 2005-2007, Asthma UK worked with the British Thoracic Society and James Lind Alliance. This was the first priority setting partnership for healthcare professionals and people affected by asthma to identify important, shared uncertainties about the effects of asthma treatment. The partnership arose from the 2004 Royal Society of Medicine ‘Medicine and Me’ conference hosted jointly with Asthma UK and attended by people with asthma, families, carers, support groups, clinicians and researchers. http://www.lindalliance.org/Asthma_Working_Partnership.asp

Wellcome Trust

Through a project funded by the Wellcome Trust, we have developed a set of guiding principles and documents for researchers, people with asthma and staff within the charity that will help us facilitate the recruitment of volunteers to high quality research projects.

The UK Respiratory Research Collaborative

Respiratory medicine is recognised as an under-funded and under-resourced area of research in relation to the number of deaths it causes and the impact it has on people’s lives. The UK Respiratory Research Collaborative (UKRRC) was launched in 2006 and is working with the MRC and a range of other research funders, including Asthma UK, to rectify this. The UKRRC was fundamental to the creation of a series of Asthma UK-MRC joint PhD studentships.

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