SURREY clinicians and residents will now have more access to world-class leading therapies, trials and innovative health care after the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) officially recognised the Surrey Clinical Trials Unit (CTU).

This builds on the success of Surrey Health Partners, a collaboration of Royal Surrey County Hospital with University of Surrey with other local health trusts.

Surrey CTU is hosted at the University of Surrey’s Clinical Research Centre. It is a UKCRC registered academic trials unit that can support clinicians and academics in design and delivery of multi-centre clinical trials.

This means that there will be more clinical trials taking place locally that patients can be involved in and patients will also benefit from innovative treatment earlier.

To be recognised by the NIHR, the Royal Surrey County Hospital and University of Surrey entered a bidding process. Only four new units were recognised by the NIHR at the end of the process.

This means the Surrey CTU is now one of only 62 CTUs in the country which is a significant accolade for the team of clinicians providing leading edge treatment to patients locally. CTU collaborates and is mentored by the Southampton CTU and it aims to support researchers from across the Kent, Surrey and Sussex NIHR Clinical Research Network.

Dr Agnieszka Michael, medical director for the Surrey CTU, said: “We aim to support our clinicians and academies with developing their clinical trials ideas. We can offer advice from experienced medical statisticians, Research Delivery Service, project managers and academics.

“Our current trials portfolio includes palliative care studies led by Dr Andrew Davis, oncology studies such as eSMART trial looking into the effectiveness of a new handheld device for patients to report symptoms and side effects experienced during chemotherapy and infectious disease trials.

“These are all multi-centre studies that are led by researchers from the Royal Surrey County Hospital and University of Surrey in collaboration with other academic institutions.

“We hope to build a network of academics that can help clinicians take their ideas forward and achieve success. The joint effort of Surrey CTU, clinicians and academics will ultimately lead to improvements for our patients.”