UK policy is for safe, personalised maternity care. However, during COVID-19 tests and visits have been reduced in some places, and some women with worrying symptoms are not going to hospital. Other places are trying new solutions, including remote access technologies. Some Trusts have reduced community maternity services, including home and birthcentre births; barred birth companions in early labour; and separated mothers, babies, and partners during labour, and in neonatal units. There are reports of women giving birth at home without professional help, possibly due to fear of infection, or of family separation. In contrast, the Netherlands has a policy of increased community maternity services during COVID-19. We want to find out how best to provide care for mothers, babies, and partners during and after a pandemic. We will look at what documents and national leads say about service organisation in the UK and the Netherlands, and at women's and parents experiences. We will also look in detail at what happened in 8 UK Trusts during the pandemic. We will find out how their services have been organised during COVID-19, what parents and staff think, and what the outcomes are, including infections. We will then share the findings with key stakeholders to agree a final organisational model that can be used to ensure safe, personalised routine and crisis maternity care, now, and in future. This will include useful resources and links relating to innovative best practices that we find out about during the study.

In recent years, cultural institutions have supported public wellbeing (e.g. increasing offers of activities and volunteering opportunities) and can be considered 'community assets' that are central to social prescribing. Social prescribing aims to empower people to address 'non-medical' challenges (e.g. isolation, anxiety, low mood) that affect how they feel physically and psychologically. The NHS has seen the introduction of link workers, employed to work in GP practices to facilitate social prescribing by connecting people to community assets (e.g. groups, organisations, charities). This might include connections to cultural institutions, which can ameliorate social isolation and give people a focus away from their worries. The COVID-19 pandemic is affecting what the cultural sector can offer, at a time when significant mental and/or social consequences of the crisis are anticipated, especially among older people. From the outset, this population was identified as 'at risk' from the condition itself and responses to it, including extreme isolation, especially if unfamiliar with online communication. Our research will explore how cultural institutions adapt to support older people's wellbeing. This will allow us to provide recommendations on being 'referral-ready'[1] cultural institutions for social prescribing for older people in the context of the current pandemic and future ones. We will use a realist approach to explore what works, for whom, why and in what circumstances. We will synthesise existing evidence to develop a programme theory on how cultural institutions might be best mobilised and engaged to support older people's resilience during and after the pandemic. We will refine this programme theory by testing it through further data collection: interviews with older people/cultural institution staff and survey with link workers.

In the UK one in two people are diagnosed with cancer during their lifetimes and of those who survive 41% can attribute their cure to a treatment including radiotherapy. Proton beam therapy (PBT) is a radical new type of radiotherapy, capable of delivering a targeted tumour dose with minimal damage to the surrounding healthy tissue. The NHS is investing £250m in two new "state of the art" PBT centres in London and Manchester. In addition, Oxford has attracted £110m (from HEFCE and business partners) for its new Centre for Precision Cancer Medicine, incorporating PBT. This EPSRC Network+ proposal seeks to bring the EPS community together with clinical, consumer and industrial partners and develop a national research infrastructure and roadmap in proton therapy. It capitalises on ~£300m of government investment and affords an opportunity for those not directly involved in the new proton centres to be actively involved in the national research effort in this area. This project has the backing of NCRI Clinical and Translational Radiotherapy Working Group and NHS England and will work with the national Proton Physics Research and Implementation Group of the National Physical Laboratory. It also involves industrial stakeholders, consumer groups and international partners (including PBT centres in Europe and USA and CERN). While PBT offers patients many advantages it also presents a wealth of technical challenges and opportunities where there is an unmet research and training need. This is where there the involvement of the EPS community is vital since this challenge in Healthcare Technologies requires expertise from across the EPS spectrum and maps on to themes in ICT, Digital Economy, Engineering, Mathematics, Manufacturing the Future, and the Physical Sciences and also finds synergies within quantum technologies. It directly maps onto the cross cutting capabilities identified in the Healthcare Technologies Grand Challenges. This is a highly multi-disciplinary area at the frontiers of physical intervention, which achieves high precision treatment with minimal invasiveness. This Network+ is particularly timely; it will afford the UK the opportunity to develop a world-leading research capability to inform the national agenda, capitalising on existing research excellence and the synergies that can be developed by bringing the clinical and EPS areas together. It will also collaborate with existing doctoral training provision to train the next generation of leaders where a national need has been identified. This proposed Network+ will create a national infrastructure to meet a national research and training need and will allow the UK community to work together in the multi-disciplinary field of proton research. This proposed Network+ will create a sustainable national proton beam infrastructure by drawing together sites where proton beams are already available (albeit at lower energies) and providing a route for the research community to access these facilities. As the new proton centres come on line they will add to this national resource and the centres will work together to provide a virtual national infrastructure for the UK, which by the end of the Network+ will be fully sustainable. The Network+ will also provide a route for those interested in the field but not requiring proton experiments to become involved. In addition, the Network+ will offer secondments ("Discipline Hops") into the clinical environment in both the UK and in PBT centres overseas. Working with NHS England the Network+ will develop a PBT training scheme. This will link the existing NHS provision with EPSRC Centres for Doctoral Training and allow equivalencies to be established and so provide a "fast track" to a skilled workforce and the next generation of leaders. The Network+ will also seek to engage with industry through joint research and secondments and with consumer groups, policy makers and the general public.

The coronavirus pandemic has seen a huge increase in the availability of resources designed to inspire and connect us during lockdown. From online singing groups and art classes, to guides for engaging creatively with nature from your window, garden or local park, there are hundreds of resources designed to combat isolation and stimulate creativity at home. We want to understand how participants engage with these initiatives, such as the Get Creative campaign. We want to know the positive and negative aspects of engaging with creative resources whilst at home, and how this affects participants' lives, their health and their wellbeing. We want to know what works, how and why, so that we can make recommendations about the key ingredients for high quality resources. We will use participant feedback to generate guidance for organisations to use to help people in their communities, through for example harnessing the power of volunteers to support people who may be less able to access online resources, and we will provide guidance regarding safeguarding, facilitation and accessibility. Finally, by working with participants, providers and partners we will use the learning from this project to enable organisations to support their communities as they adapt to post-lockdown Britain.

Serious illness and bereavement affect us all, but our experiences of them are not equal. People living in the poorest areas of the UK are less likely to get the care and support they need if they become seriously ill or a loved one dies. They are also more likely to be socially isolated and lonely - which can be made even worse by serious illness or bereavement. This project is based in Weston-super-Mare, a deprived coastal town in North Somerset. Nine of its neighbourhoods are among the poorest 10% in the country. The population is growing, getting older and living with more frailty and long-term, complex health conditions. There are also high levels of mental health and addiction problems. The project team will create a strong group with a shared aim ('a consortium') that unites health and social care workers, people providing community assets (collective resources which are available to individuals and communities, e.g. arts organisations, charities and community groups), academics, and people with lived experience to work together to reduce health inequities in Weston-super-Mare and the North Somerset region. Our consortium will focus on inequities related to end-of-life care, bereavement support, social isolation and loneliness. During the 9 months of the project, we will hold 3 consortium meetings and work together to: 1. create a directory of community assets and interview key people to understand how health and social care and community assets can best work together 2. design and evaluate creative and cultural activities to be held over Dying Matters Awareness Week (DMAW, May 2023), with members of the public employed as co-researchers 3. hold creative workshops with local groups (people with drug and alcohol addiction problems, young people, and older men) to facilitate conversations about grief and illness, raise awareness of local support, and help inform our DMAW events 4. review existing evaluation data from arts/creative organisations working in Weston-super-Mare over the last 5 years (2017-2022) to identify what activities have best engaged and benefitted the community, and draw on this in designing DMAW events 5. map available health and social care data and determine how it can be used to help understand, measure and reduce inequities 6. hold a final consortium meeting to: review all our work; consider how we can apply our findings in other deprived coastal towns; and agree research questions and methods for a future joint funding application The project will benefit: 1) the Integrated Care System (ICS), strengthening their relationships with community organisations and the public in Weston-super-Mare and providing information (community asset directory, map of datasets) to enable equitable end-of-life care and bereavement support; 2) community organisations, by bringing recognition and funding (via linking with the ICS) and helping them reach more people (via linking with the consortium and awareness raising at events); 3) creative and cultural organisations, by enabling them to engage and empower local community members in an evidence-based way, providing training to artists and increasing links with the ICS and community organisations; 4) members of the public, who will learn about the care and support available to them via the ICS and community assets and benefit from opportunities to express their experiences and socialise in creative workshops, attend free events, participate as co-researchers and at consortium meetings; 5) academic researchers, by modelling new multidisciplinary, collaborative ways of creating research and building evidence about how community assets can help reduce health inequities; 6) policy makers, by making recommendations for how ICSs can best harness community assets. We will engage with these groups via consortium meetings, blogs, the project website, journal articles, reports, presentations at community/ICS events and a policy brief.