A project led by the Oxford Nuffield Department of Medicine’s Centre for Global Health Research (CGHR), and the Kenya Medical Research Institute (KMRI), has been given the 2025 Vice-Chancellor’s Research Engagement Award. Mike English, Professor of International Child Health at the Nuffield Department of Medicine, and a Senior Associate Research Fellow at Christ Church, represented the international team at the awards ceremony.

The Award recognises research and teaching excellence, innovation and achievements of academics at the University of Oxford. Professor English and his team have been undertaking a project ‘engaging stakeholders to build a Kenyan learning health system’. The system would follow the principles set out by the National Academy of Medicine, according to which ‘science, informatics, incentives, and culture are aligned for continuous improvement and innovation, with best practices seamlessly embedded in the delivery process and new knowledge captured as an integral by-product of the delivery experience.’

The Oxford–Kenya team worked with national and local governments, professional associations and regulators, practitioners, and patient groups to conduct research and simultaneously improve care, reaching 24 hospitals and more than 650,000 inpatients. The team developed and considerably improved routine health information systems by co-designing standardised medical records that hospitals themselves introduced, and built local systems for daily data capture.