Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board (BCUHB) is the largest health organisation in Wales, with a budget of £1.3 billion and a workforce of over 17,000 staff. Providing primary, community, mental health and acute hospital services for the population of North Wales.

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As well as its three main hospital sites at Ysbyty Gwynedd in Bangor, Glan Clwyd Hospital in Bodelwyddan and Wrexham Maelor Hospital, BCUHB are also responsible for community hospitals, health centres, clinics, mental health units, community teams, GP practices and other NHS services provided by dentists, opticians and pharmacists. 

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The Maelor Academic Unit of Medical & Surgical Sciences (MAUMSS) is a novel initiative by the Betsi Cadwaladr University Health Board (BCUHB), co-established in 2021 by Prof Iqbal Shergill, Prof Stephen Fôn Hughes & Prof Arvind Arya, and is designed to encourage and support research within the Health Board and to promote academic activity, basic science and clinical research across North Wales and beyond. MAUMSS is located in Wrexham and staffed by an interdisciplinary team of academics, clinicians, scientists and postgraduate students who are available to lead on and help other healthcare professionals develop and run all kinds of clinical research projects. It has several laboratories containing state-of-the-art molecular, analytical and diagnostic equipment. There are also meeting rooms, video-conferencing and hot-desk facilities too. All of this is available for use to encourage new researchers, help maximise research impact and ultimately provide better outcomes for patients and the public.

 

Maelor Academic Unit of Medical & Surgical Sciences (MAUMSS)

Vision, Mission and Values

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Our vision

Our vision is for the Maelor Academic Unit of Medical & Surgical Sciences (MAUMSS) to be globally recognised as an internationally leading centre of excellence for broad-based, cross-disciplinary academia and research scholarly activity in healthcare.

 

Our mission

We are dedicated to the promotion, development, and delivery of excellence in all aspects of healthcare academia and associated research scholarly activity, by undertaking feasibility and basic science research that will provide a sound platform to establish and subsequently deliver clinical and translational medical research.

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We will achieve this by:

MAUMSS Unit will actively support the development of collaborative partnerships with colleagues throughout academia, industry, and the stakeholder community within the Wales, the United Kingdom and internationally.

 

Our values

To foster and maintain an inclusive, encouraging, and supportive community built on trust and underpinned by academic excellence that values diversity of disciplines and philosophies. In turn, ideas and innovation can flourish and deliver real practical benefits to the academic and healthcare sector.

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                                                         BCUHB Maelor Academic Unit of Medical & Surgical Sciences (MAUMSS)

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The main aims and objectives of MAUMSS are,

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• Enhance the Health Boards profile by promoting MAUMSS as a Centre of Excellence for supporting staff development and continuing education and training, which is central to all healthcare professional’s practice, with the emphasis being based on lifelong learning.

 

• Promote and develop expertise in academia (programme development), healthcare education (teaching and learning), and to encourage staff within the region and beyond to undertake research scholarly activities.

 

• Develop a PAN Wales collaborative approach to academia and research scholarly activity, which will encourage proof of concept, feasibility and basic science research that may lead to fully adopted Health & Care Research Wales (HCRW) clinical studies.

 

• Develop and sustain long-term collaborative partnerships with local, national, and international higher education institutions.

 

• Develop and subsequently delivery a portfolio of bespoke continuous professional development (CPD) courses, and to initiate and undertake private laboratory work.

 

• To work closely with the local and regional BCUHB Research & Innovation Groups, in turn supporting the delivery of the BCUHB R&I strategy.

 

• By achieving above aims, and dedicated commitment to lifelong learning the Maelor Academic Unit will help attract and retain high calibre Clinicians and Healthcare Professionals to the area.

 

To achieve these aims, collaboration within the NHS and with academic and commercial organisations is essential. MAUMSS has established collaborations with Wrexham Glyndwr, Aberystwyth, Staffordshire, Keele, Bangor, Warwick, Oxford, Swansea, Cardiff and Birmingham Universities along with the MRC Laboratory of Molecular Biology in Cambridge. Via BCUHB, the MAUSS is an official partner with Wales Cancer Research Centre and Wales Kidney Research Unit. It is also affiliated with the Celtic Advanced Life Science Network and the Life Sciences Hub Wales.

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                                                                         MAUMSS Teaching & Research Laboratories

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Feasibility or basic science research studies currently underway at MAUMSS include using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to monitor patients before and after surgery to identify those who will develop complications. Several studies are looking to develop novel urological biomarkers to aid in the prediction of patients with post-operative complications and cancer recurrence. Changes to microRNA expression in head and neck tumours and epigenetic changes in triple negative breast cancer are also being investigated. A molecular diagnostic technique is also being developed for the rapid diagnosis of bacterial meningitis in new born babies, as is a project looking at hearing loss in elderly patients with dementia.

 

As part of its formal collaborative partnership with Wrexham Glyndwr University (WGU), MAUMSS has been instrumental in conceiving, developing and subsequently delivering an Institute of Biomedical Science (IBMS) accredited BSc (Hons) Biomedical Science, an MSc Biomedical Science and two IBMS approved MRes programmes in Applied Biomedical Sciences Research and Applied Clinical Research. MAUMSS, in collaboration with WGU, also deliver successful MPhil and PhD (including Professional Doctorates) programmes. To date, these academic programmes have been very successful and continue to grow and have provided the opportunity for the development of new academic programmes, which further strengthens the well-established collaborative partnership between BUCHB and WGU.

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