Disruption resilient manufacturing is becoming increasingly important, with the current COVID-19 pandemic bringing this to the fore. Whilst COVID-19 was a natural disaster, the increasing digitisation of supply chains and manufacturing processes means further widespread challenges with respect to malicious activity and cyber attacks that can cause significant disruption. Whilst the news suggests many of these take place on digital platforms or within financial or health institutions, there is growing evidence that cyber-physical systems, such as manufacturing, are becoming more regularly targeted and therefore subject to disruption. For instance, a recent Cisco (2017) report found that 28% of manufacturers across 13 countries suffered cyber-attacks that resulted in revenue loss, with this set to increase as digitisation of the manufacturing industry increases. Therefore, it is crucial to identify methods of both securing against and reconfiguring if needed the point of production within the supply network should a string within the supply network become compromised. This research focuses specifically on additive manufacturing supply chains as part of a responsive manufacturing system, to address the significant security challenges within manufacturing supply chains to ensure greater levels of supply chain resilience for both UK and global manufacturing. In particular, this would address the call from Additive Manufacturing UKs (2017) UK National Strategy Report for AM, where they highlighted a critical challenge is to address security related challenges in AM production, with the importance of this increasing if production is to be distributed and responsive to emergent changes within the system, such as an adversary infiltrating elements of the supply chain. To support such rapid reconfiguration of the manufacturing system across the supply network, our vision is to create a practicable methodology for manufacturing systems that can detect a threat and reconfigure themselves rapidly in the presence of an adversary. The work packages developed as part of this research further address the critical challenges outlined above and underpin our vision through the development of 'double lock' system, of physical hash on the product and digital hash on component files secured against a distributed ledger technology, that can be scaled across and tailored to different SC configurations, allowing manufacturing to be responsive to disruption and enable greater resilience and agility in UK manufacturing SCs. This proposal also considers both the current state of the art in academic research, and the fundamental needs and applied research from industry. This research is transformative as it meets the twin hurdle of academic rigour and industrial relevance. To create tools and techniques for resilient additive manufacturing this research will address the following challenges: - How to develop effective techniques to detect disruption; - How to effectively and accurately analyse the disruption; and - How to respond to disruption through reconfigured manufacture.

There is an extremely high demand for laboratory-based blood tests from community settings in the UK and analysis suggests an important role in the future for remote blood monitoring that would enable patients and health professionals to carry out their own tests remotely, greatly benefiting patients and speeding up decision making. The COVID-19 pandemic has further highlighted the need for remote and connected blood testing that is beyond the online virtual clinics in the NHS outpatient setting. In current blood testing services for community healthcare, it is challenging to obtain and process blood samples outside of the clinical setting without training and lab facilities, and patients are required to attend a GP surgery or hospital for tests with travel burden and infection risk. Many blood analyses are done in batches that take a long time to build up, meaning the speed of blood sample analysis of routine tests and time taken for diagnosis are further challenges. Despite recent innovations in point of care, current blood analysis tools in practice are mainly mechanical or labour-intensive that require extensive filtering and manual tweaking and not suitable for regular at-home monitoring and longitudinal analytics. There is no personalised real-time approach available to inform disease complexity and conditions over time, which are critical for early detection of acute diseases and the management of chronic conditions. In England, around 95% of clinical pathways rely on patients having access to efficient, timely and cost-effective pathology services and there are 500 million biochemistry and 130 million haematology tests are carried out per year. This means inefficient and infrequent blood testing leads to late diagnosis, incomplete knowledge of disease progression and potential complications in a wide range of populations. Taking those challenges into account and current digital transformation in healthcare, this is a timely opportunity to bring researchers, clinicians and industrialist together to address the challenges of blood monitoring and analytics. The proposed Network+ will build an interdisciplinary community that will explore future blood testing solutions to achieve remote, inclusive, rapid, affordable and personalised blood monitoring, and address the above challenges in community health and care. To achieve the Network+ vision, research of technologies will be conducted from collaborations among information and communication technology (ICT), data and analytical science, clinical science, applied optics, biochemistry, engineering and social sciences in the Network+. The network will address three key technical challenges in blood testing: Remote monitoring, ICT, Personalised data and AI in a range of examplar clinical areas including cancer, autoimmune diseases, sickle cell disease, preoperative care, pathology services and general primary care.

COVID-19 has disproportionately affected healthcare staff from black, Asian, and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds. As the NHS is reliant on a diverse workforce, it is crucial to mitigate the impact of the pandemic on the wellbeing of BAME staff and thereby alleviate longer-term effects on service delivery and workforce planning. A current obstacle to achieving this successfully is a lack of understanding among healthcare organisations of how to design culturally appropriate and inclusive human resource management (HRM) practices that ensure BAME employees feel valued and supported. This 18 - month long study proposes to address this challenge by coordinating a survey, follow-up interviews, and a series of workshops in partnership with three NHS organisations. The partner organisations will provide links with their BAME/diversity networks and facilitate the recruitment of BAME staff employed directly and via employment agencies. Surveys of BAME staff at all levels will investigate staff perceptions of organisational support, estimate their effects on wellbeing and identify areas of need. Targeted interviews with BAME staff will provide unique insights into critical experiences and impacts of COVID-19 on the BAME talent pipeline. Finally, a series of workshops will engage NHS managers, BAME networks, and trade unions in co-producing HRM practices that target BAME staff wellbeing, progression, and retention. The project will lead to the development of a set of HRM practices and policy recommendations to transform organisational support for BAME employees. Organisational stakeholders and the research team will also co-produce a training framework and educational resources to raise awareness of BAME perspectives and wellbeing-oriented HRM practices. These will be piloted through the partner organisations and integrated into final deliverables.

According to statistics from charities such as Every Eight Hours and Spinal Research, there are an estimated 40,000 spinal cord injured people in the UK and a new person is injured every eight hours. Many primary causes of death are now no longer direct results of spinal cord injury but are conditions linked to age and inactivity. This means that there are long-term demands on medical support; in particular, treatment of osteoporotic bone fractures often results in lengthy spells in hospital for individuals with spinal cord injury. It is therefore important to minimize the effect of osteoporosis after spinal cord injury; this highlights the need for exercise programmes to target bone health. The proposed research aims to develop effective Functional Electrical Stimulation (FES) induced weight bearing exercises to improve and maintain bone health in the lower extremities of spinal cord injury patients. The type of exercises proposed will be completed using a novel smart standing frame and FES system to cyclically activate different sets of muscles whilst maintaining standing and crouch poses. The hypothesis is that these exercises will induce sufficient joint contact forces to be beneficial for bone health in the ankle, knee and hip joints. Using biomechanical modelling software an optimal combination of these exercises will be sought in order to design a rehabilitation programme to target bone health. To be beneficial to bone health, these exercises need to be repeated several times a week and there is a good chance patients will get bored or frustrated doing the same thing every day. To solve this problem, rehabilitation aids will be developed to keep patients motivated. These aids will use video game technology (based on the Xbox Kinect), to make the sessions more engaging for the patient to encourage compliance and give a sense of achievement. This will also allow the patient and clinician to monitor the progress of a rehabilitation programme and modify it as necessary.

Radiotherapy treatment is delivered to over half of cancer patients, and due to the ageing population and lifestyle factors the prevalence of cancer is rising. EPIDs (electronic portal imaging devices) are used during the treatment delivery process to control patient set-up and positioning. The demand for accurate treatment verification has led to the possibility of using EPIDs to acquire dosimetric information. Recent government guidelines require that each radiotherapy centre should have protocols for in vivo dosimetry monitoring and that it should be used at the beginning of treatment for most patients. Within the radiotherapy physics community EPID dosimetry is widely seen to have the potential to become an accurate and efficient means of large-scale patient specific in-vivo dose verification for Intensity Modulated RadioTherapy at any radiotherapy department. Current EPID technology is based upon passive amorphous silicon flat panel imagers. In this proposal we plan to investigate the application of next generation sensor technology, developed by the STFC CMOS Sensor Design Group, which has both superior image quality and active functionality. We propose to carry out a feasibility study with a long-term view to developing the following transit dosimetry technology: a large area, ultra high image quality flat panel imager displaying real-time, calibrated dose map updates throughout treatment delivery. The core of the system will be an STFC developed CMOS Active Pixel Sensor. It will not only introduce large area, radiation hard CMOS technology to EPID systems but will go a significant step further and introduce next generation Active Pixel Sensor technology.