Project SELECTION PROCESS

Overview

• Once a year, we invite all trainees in London to submit ideas to PLAN using a project proposal form. 

• Submissions are anonymised and reviewed by the core committee, comprising of representatives from each anaesthesia school in London. Following an initial review, we provide authors with feedback or suggestions for development.

• If your project is shortlisted, you will be invited to present your idea at our annual project selection event, the Annual Scientific Meeting (ASM), held in association with HEE London. 

• Following the presentations, projects with the most votes from the audience will be selected to be run as PLAN projects over the coming year. Ordinarily, only one or two projects will be selected during each meeting.

Important links

• Flowchart of details on the project selection process

• Project proposal form for submission

• PLAN project selection committee shortlisting criteria

What you can expect from PLAN

• If your project is selected, you will take on the role of Project Lead 

• We will provide the academic, operational and logistical expertise of the network. 

• We will support the further development of your idea into a deliverable multi-centre study. 

• We can help you manage web data entry portals to make multi-centre data collection easy and secure. 

• Where appropriate, we will help you to apply for NIAA funding and if successful, we will aim to get your study adopted to the NIHR portfolio. 

• As your project enters the recruitment phase, our regional representatives will enlist hospitals from across our network of over 40 centres in London to participate in your study. 

• In each hospital, we will appoint a local project lead who will assemble a team to oversee the project.

What your role of Projet Lead entails

• As Project Lead, you will remain the figurehead and key decision maker for your study. Our aim is to support your decision making with the expertise and institutional learning gained within the network. 

• We can help you to prepare and review a manuscript for publication. Our aim is to guide and support you through every step of the process of designing, running and publishing a successful, trainee-led multi-centre study. 

• In return we ask that you share and disseminate your learning and expertise with the rest of the network and help make future projects even more successful.

Overview

PLAN projects have evolved in ambition over the last few generations, from prospective “snap” audits of practice towards larger scale, observational research studies. However we always evaluate each project by its own merits and are equally receptive to audit, quality improvement or research ideas being submitted. Each project is selected following a democratic voting process by audience members at the PLAN Annual Scientific Meeting. To help you get started with a project idea that you might wish to run through the PLAN network, we’ve provided some hints and tips to focus your inspiration.

Multi-centre by design

• PLAN is the largest regional anaesthetic trainee network in the UK, with a coverage extending to over 40 hospitals in the Greater London area. 

• The best project ideas take advantage of this network to allow the simultaneous collection of data across multiple healthcare centres. 

• By designing a project that is intrinsically suitable to running in this format, you stand the greatest chance of your project being selected. 

• This means keeping your intervention for each site relatively straightforward; complex procedures or measurements are significantly more difficult to manage when administered remotely and on a large scale. 

• Try to think about ideas, solutions and problems that share common ground at several hospitals, rather than being unique to a single site. 

• As trainees we are uniquely well placed to make these judgments - moving between hospitals as part of our training rotations gives us insight into recurring problems and exposure to a variety of solutions.

Addressess a relevant and topical issue

• Our goal with each project is always to make a contribution towards understanding of an important issue in perioperative care. 

• A valid scientific underpinning for a topic is appealing and pulls favour when it comes to submitting your project manuscript to journal editors for publication. 

• That is not to say that slightly more niche ideas won’t be considered; a niche problem in multiple hospitals still speaks in volume. 

Feasible data collection

• It is vital that data collection is achievable on a wide scale. 

• Collecting data on very rare patient cohorts or only in very specific circumstances is not impossible, but requires careful consideration to ensure robust, repeatable methods of data collection. 

• “Snap” data collection is popular, but not the only way to investigate a clinical problem. Longitudinal sampling methods needs to be simple and sustainable.

A committed and dynamic Project Lead!

• Leading a PLAN project can be an involving, but highly rewarding, responsibility. 

• Although you will receive considerable advice, support and assistance throughout the entire course of your project, you still need to dedicate time and energy to fulfilling the project lead role. 

• The PLAN committee will facilitate with every stage of your project: from development, to conduct to publication. 

• But we want you to retain ownership of your idea, alongside the satisfaction and recognition from turning the idea into a completed project.