Burdett Trust for Nursing High Impact Interventions Grant Programme – Chronic Respiratory Diseases (CRDs)

Grant scheme for nurse-led interventions focused on reducing hospitalisation, morbidity and mortality due to chronic respiratory diseases.

Established in 2002, the Burdett Trust for Nursing is an independent charitable trust that allocates grants to support the nursing contribution to healthcare.

The Trust’s High Impact Interventions Grant Programme – Chronic Respiratory Diseases (CRDs) seeks to fund interventions focused on reducing hospitalisation, morbidity and mortality with regard to CRDs that are nurse-led and have the nursing contribution to healthcare at their core. The Trust’s funding strategy is focused on reducing death and the impact of longer-term disability related to non-communicable diseases (NCDs). As a result of this, from 2022 for a period of five years, the Trust will run a series of grant programmes targeting one of the four main categories of NCDs. This is the third grant programme in the series.

The incidence of CRDs is increasing at an international level, with the most prevalent CRDs being chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) and asthma. CRDs affect over 8 million people in the UK and although often preventable, they account for one in five deaths annually. As well as their association with significant morbidity and mortality, they cause serious socioeconomic problems directly in terms of healthcare costs and indirectly through work absenteeism and premature invalidity. The leading causes of CRDs are environmental/occupational pollutants, previous childhood respiratory infections, tobacco use, lack of physical activity, poor housing conditions and poor nutrition.

The Trust believes that nurses are well-placed to deliver respiratory research that is firmly embedded in clinical practice and to lead, deliver and coordinate inpatient, outpatient and community-based interventions that are designed to prevent and reduce the impact and consequences of respiratory disease. They are ideally placed in practice to identify new and better therapies for the many respiratory diseases where outcomes remain poor, and to develop evidence-informed strategies to educate patients and support their self-management to enable them to continue to live more fulfilled lives.

Funding through this scheme will therefore support innovative, nurse-led initiatives that will improve early diagnosis, access to treatment, smoking cessation and generally assist members of the public to manage CRDs to improve their quality of life.

Proposals must be well-argued and demonstrate why the project is needed and the benefits and impacts it will deliver. The application must also describe how the project will generate learning that can be shared, disseminated and adopted more widely. Applications for projects with a significant educational element will be required to demonstrate evidence of a strong service-academic partnership.

All successful grant holders will be expected to take part in a half-day conference in central London to share their learning and publicise the outcomes of this programme.