NCSEM where are we now?

The Advanced BRAIN Health Clinic at the Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health (ISEH) has been running in full swing since its high-profile launch in 2022. Led by Professor David Sharp and Dr Richard Sylvester, this specialist pathway offers a unique provision of clinical care combined with elite sport research. It includes advanced imaging, biomarker analysis and neurocognitive assessment for retired elite rugby and football players, who are assessed on three occasions over a four-year period for any time-related changes in brain health.

The clinic has assessed 58 footballers and 199 rugby players, with users of the clinic invited to share their experiences, providing constructive feedback on how the visits were structured and providing advice on the research study components. The clinic is delivered at the ISEH in partnership with Imperial College London, jointly funded by The Rugby Football Union and Premiership Rugby, and The Football Association.

The National Rehabilitation Centre (NRC) will transform outcomes for people who have suffered potentially life-changing injury, trauma or illness, by fully integrating research, innovation, education and training with clinical practice. The NRC is a £105million programme which will create a 70-bed, purpose-built new facility as part of the Government’s New Hospital Programme. The specialist NHS facility will be built on the Stanford Hall Rehabilitation Estate near Loughborough, home to the Defence Medical Rehabilitation Centre which opened in 2018.

The NRC is due to open in Summer 2025. With clinical services led by NUH NHS Trust, Loughborough University and the University of Nottingham are the two lead academic partners. Along with national network of 24 universities we will deliver improved education and training in the field of rehabilitation and deliver world-leading research and innovation that will help to transform clinical rehabilitation in the UK.

Moving Healthcare Professionals is a national programme, led by the Office for Health Improvement and Disparities (OHID) and Sport England, to support healthcare professionals to increase their knowledge and skills, and incorporate physical activity within routine care to support quality improvement and better patient outcomes.

The phase one programme evaluation was carried out by the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine at Sheffield Hallam University and Loughborough University. The assessment of the Phase Two of the Moving Healthcare Professionals Programme (MHPP) was carried out by the National Centre for Sport and Exercise Medicine, research hubs at Sheffield Hallam University and Loughborough University and, global leader in market research, Ipsos.

The evaluation produced a series of findings, which were split into two areas – education, training and learning resources and creating system change – on how the promotion of physical activity influenced the workforce and the overall system and stakeholders.

Institute of Sport, Exercise and Health (ISEH) colleagues who specialise in exercise physiology have been collaborating with UCL colleagues specialising in neuroscience to undertake cutting-edge research investigating the impact of exercise and physical activity on brain activity and cognitive development. UCL has invested heavily in research equipment in this area. This new integrated equipment enables real time synchronised data collection and will allow the ISEH to deliver cutting edge research in exercise neuroscience, biomechanics and physiology.

The lab-based fNIRS equipment will enable the study of brain connectivity and changes in cortical activity following exercise. The portable fNIRS systems will enable school visits to study child cognitive development after physical activity interventions, and to collect pitch-side brain imaging changes before and after sport sessions. By integrating the biomechanical system (3D cameras, EMG, force plates) with the wireless brain fNIRS, the relationship between brain activity and movement can be examined.

CLiMB involves world leading academics, researchers and health professionals who are working to provide high quality evidence to reduce preventable diseases in the population, and impact public health practice and policy. We are a Centre that brings together experts in behavioural science, clinical medicine and population health.

We collaborate with colleagues throughout the world, including CLiMB Ghana, and have been consistently awarded research funding from nationally competitive funding calls. The Centre has a focus on developing a critical mass of the next generation of leading researchers and on offering opportunities for collaboration and knowledge exchange.

Move More Empowered communities wants to support communities to move more where they live. This is done by understanding the approaches that are most likely to make this work, what helps, and what doesn’t.

Move More Empowering Communities (MMEC) project aimed to support voluntary, community, faith, and social enterprise (VCSE) organisations across Sheffield work with communities with the lowest levels of physical activity. The aim was to work with these communities to understand what works to enable physical activity at a local level, what factors affect this, and ultimately enable more people to be active in ways and places that suit them.

In the Empowered Communities project, we wanted to look at what worked well and support the things, places, and people who do provide physical activity opportunities to grow. Or, try to introduce physical activity elements to things, places, or people who don’t do physical activity already but do support people in other ways.

The ISEH has developed highly valued partnerships with the charities Greenhouse Sports, Active Movement and Volunteers Foundation, as well as with the UCL Institute of Cognitive Neuroscience. These partnerships have enabled the development of some interesting research opportunities, particularly investigating the role of physical activity in supporting the cognitive development of children.

There is increasing evidence supporting the value of physical activity throughout childhood. However, with schools and families under a range of different time and financial pressures, physical activity is often not prioritised. The goal of this research at the ISEH is to provide further evidence calling for a change in government policy to ensure all children have the opportunity for physical activity.

Within this theme the research team is exploring the times of day when physical activity would be most beneficial, the most advantageous type of activity, intensity and duration, and how the benefits of physical activity relate to other lifestyle factors such as body composition or socioeconomic status.

Researchers from the NCSEM-EM and the Peter Harrison Centre for Disability Sport together with colleagues in Canada have developed scientific guidelines to inform people with spinal cord injury (SCI) how much exercise is necessary for important fitness and health benefits.

The guidelines, developed through a series of consensus panels, are now ready to be shared with local spinal cord injury communities to determine the most suitable format and methods of distributing the guidelines more widely.

One in three peoples in England live with a health condition. Those with a health condition are twice as likely to be amongst the least physically active, yet we know that being active can help to manage conditions and increase quality and length of life.

The #EasierToBeActive project explored the ways in which people with long-term health conditions can be helped to lead a more active lifestyle. The project consisted of three phases:

• Phase 1 – an online conversation (March-May 2020)
• Phase 2 – interviews with leaders in the physical activity system (September 2020 – February 2021)
• Phase 3 – a second online conversation to test and refine the findings (April – June 2021)

The collective insight from the conversations has been used to co-create new insight and recommendations for those who provide, design, commission and deliver sport, physical activity and health and care services so that we can improve the experience of being active for people with health conditions.

The ISEH prides itself in bringing together clinicians, researchers and the health and sports sector to collaborate in producing cutting-edge research that has positive real-life implications. A good example of this is the work being undertaken by Prof. Fares Haddad and Dr Dia Giebaly in undertaking the first study of its kind to examine the gait biomechanical analysis of patients that have undergone robotic assisted knee and hip surgery.

There is growing evidence that robotic assisted knee and hip surgery has improved the accuracy of implant positioning resulting in better functional outcomes of these joints post-operation in comparison to more conventional surgical procedures on these joints. This study is looking to increase the understanding of the actual functional outcomes on the joints, patient satisfaction and gait analysis following this type of surgery and comparing it with more conventional methods.