MLTC-M Community of Practice in Clinical Context and Pathways (Clinical Community of Practice)

People tend to accumulate health problems and diagnoses. When several long-term health problems or diagnoses co-exist it is called multimorbidity. Our research is funded by the Strategic Priorities Fund as multimorbidity is now recognised as a huge problem in the UK and across the world. Traditionally, clinical research has focussed on one health condition, and often people with several diagnoses, or multimorbidity, have been excluded from research studies. We are asking for funding to work together between the research groups on multimorbidity.
We aim to create a Community of Practice for clinicians (doctors, nurses, pharmacists, physiotherapists or from any clinical background) working on multimorbidity research. This clinical "Community of Practice" (CoP) will provide an opportunity for clinicians researching multimorbidity in separate research groups to meet each other, learn, share ideas and come up with new ideas together to form future research.
The clinical CoP will be focussed around an online platform, where we can interact with each other and form groups with specific focuses. For example, some health problems can be diagnosed without question - such as heart attack or stroke - while others are more complicated to define, such as mental health conditions, pain or incontinence. Even more complicated is linking different health problems into clusters. These smaller groups might focus on these complex areas. We will run a face-to-face launch event and work together to see what the priorities should be - we want to make sure that we work effectively to overcome the biggest challenges. After that, we will communicate with our members on the online platform (which we hope to develop with other clinical researchers in multimorbidity, via the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR)), on social media via a specific hashtag, and by a monthly newsletter. Our core group of investigators will meet every 3 months. 6 virtual workshops will be run on key topics. We will make sure that we talk to other funded CoPs to see if we can work together on specific topics to combine our clinical skills with their skills: for example with the proposed Statistical Methods CoP and Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement. We will conduct a survey via our networks to try to understand what clinicians think are the key priorities for multimorbidity research, which we will write up for publication and which is likely to lead on to other work in this area.
The CoP will support the communication of this multimorbidity research to clinicians, and help to increase multimorbidity research and research delivery capacity. We will host symposiums, and already have agreement in principle from key partners in primary care and geriatric medicine to feature CoP research in their conferences. We will also host an event towards the end of the CoP funding as a clinical showcase to a wider clinical audience and other interested people.
A further key way in which the clinical CoP can support multimorbidity work is to consider the next steps in this research and how we can move towards patient benefit. We anticipate that this will be the focus of a working group, a virtual workshop and a writing group to work together on future funding proposals. We have the support of the NIHR Clinical Research Network leads in Primary Care and Ageing, who have told us that they fully support this clinical CoP as it will facilitate early communication about planning future research.
Overall, this clinical CoP aims to accelerate progress in multimorbidity research, while ensuring that it is clinically relevant, train and enthuse clinicians to work and lead multimorbidity research and plan pathways to patient impact. By working with key partners, developing a sustainable online platform for the wider multimorbidity research community and development of future funding proposals this clinical CoP legacy will outlast the funding.

This clinical Community of Practice (CoP) will enable meaningful networking and collaboration between clinician researchers working with multiple long-term conditions/multimorbidity (MLTC-M) and aid dissemination and pathways to impact. The clinical CoP is flexible to address the clinical challenges of the MLTC-M Research Collaboratives. We have initiated dialogue with the NIHR Clinical Research Network (CRN) project on MLTC-M, and plan to develop an online platform with NIHR Learn to support online networking and communication for clinicians in MLTC-M. A monthly newsletter will include professional development opportunities and events, and a specific hashtag will facilitate social media connections. The clinical CoP will host two face-to-face events: a launch event, to co-develop initial priorities with members and a clinical showcase for cross-Collaborative presentations. Between these events we will host 3 symposiums of cross-Collaborative research tailored to specific conferences, eg. the British Geriatrics Society and the Society of Academic Primary Care, from whom we have support in principle. We will conduct a survey to understand clinicians' key priorities for MLTC-M research, which we anticipate will be published and further developed to form a Delphi exercise through writing groups for external funding. We will organise 6 online workshops, focussed on priorities established by CoP members, working synergistically and responsively with other CoPs. These might include complex phenotypes or disease clusters and pathways to impact. We will support the formation of topic-specific working groups, which may overlap in content and timing with these workshops, and writing groups to co-develop external grant applications, for example on patient-focussed pathways to impact. The platform and community will outlast the funded CoP through stakeholder partnership, engagement with the wider MLTC-M clinical research community and collaborative funding bids.