NRC Ambition

To become a world-leading national centre of excellence for rehabilitation.

In the near term, the NRC is about creating a building and a programme of work that will make an immediate and positive difference.

The NRC aims to:

• Collaborate: use knowledge across Defence and NHS medicine for mutual benefit and to stimulate new ways of solving problems.
• Research and innovation: invest in and enable new research that leads to better treatments for patients. This includes putting that research at the heart of patient rehabilitation programmes so researchers and patients can learn from each other, and maximise the impact of the resulting innovations in real time to benefit patients today.
• Train and educate: provide and develop pioneering training for clinical and healthcare professionals working in rehabilitation at all levels and with clear pathways for career progression.
• Foster new technologies: provide a place to pioneer new products and technologies that can take treatments to another level and provide patients with independence even faster.

Together, all of these individual areas of work will combine to transform the provision of clinical rehabilitation in the UK.

The Hub and Spoke model

The longer-term ambition of the NRC Programme is for a network of regional rehabilitation centres across the country, potentially linked to the regional major trauma centres.

This would create a ‘hub and spoke’ model, with each of these regional spokes linking back to the national NRC ‘hub’.

If achieved, this would mean a full system and step-change in clinical rehabilitation across the NHS and could be transformative for individuals, their families, the NHS and the UK.