Alder Hey’s vision is to create a healthier, happier and fairer future for children and young people, guided by the needs of children, young people and their families. This means working with our partners to deliver better care, better medicines and better treatments.
Professor Dan Hawcutt has recently been appointed as the Founding Director of the Liverpool Institute of Child Health and Wellbeing, a new initiative that will bring together world-leading expertise from across the University of Liverpool, Alder Hey, and other partners to transform research and outcomes for children and young people.
“If I am honest, children have not been well served over the last decade or so. Raising levels of inequality, COVID restrictions affecting key stages of their lives, rising rates of obesity and mental illness, decreased vaccination rates leading to preventable diseases returning, the list goes on. None of this is their fault, and as a paediatrician and paediatric researcher it breaks my heart.
So what are we going to do about it? Something needs to be done, and despite my gloomy start to this blog, the building blocks are here and ready, but it can be hard to see what they could become.
To achieve this, Alder Hey and The University of Liverpool have agreed to work together, along with Alder Hey Children’s Charity, to create the Liverpool Institute of Child Health and Wellbeing, and it was first announced in October 2024 by Secretary of Health West Streeting. All of them have long, proud histories, advancing the science and delivery of healthcare and more for children in Liverpool, across the UK, and across the world. But Alder Hey and the University of Liverpool are two different organisations, and so it is not surprising that they have found themselves working in parallel, doing good things for children in places, but not always knowing what the other is achieving. The opportunities that could come from aligning and integrating their efforts are huge. My new role as Director is to make sure we link up all these pieces and create a new, united, positive force for change.
The goals of the Institute are pretty simple:
- To listen to children and young people and get THEM to tell us what their problems are, and which ones are the most important. We must make the effort to go to them and listen.
- To take the needs of children directly to the scientists and put these problems on their radar, driving discovery and research excellence.
- To find the latest scientific discoveries and apply them to the healthcare and social problems children face, in the hospital and across the community, maximising the research’s impact.
- To work with everyone who wants to improve the lives of children, creating a range of partners who are all working to the same goal.
- To make sure that the next generation of paediatric researchers is trained and ready to tackle the problems of the future.
To make this happen, it is really important that we don’t re-create the wheel. The University and Alder Hey have excellent teams and centres who do great work, and don’t need to come to a whole series of new meetings. They do need us to go to them, bringing the needs of children to where they are now, and positively influencing them. We know that there are established and successful research teams – we don’t need to break this up, but we need to know who else is out there, what paediatric expertise we could link with them, to make sure the ideas we are promoting also have credible potential collaborators. We need to be agnostic about what the problems the young people will flag up and not just rely on the research and clinical strengths we know exist already.
We also need to be loud. Children and young people are going to drive the agenda, and our research will produce evidence, but if we don’t start from a position of being willing to speak truth to power, be it local, regional or national, then we are limiting our ambition and squandering the goodwill and effort of the children, young people, clinicians and researchers. Championing our evidence-based findings and driving positive policy changes should be considered a key outcome from the Liverpool Institute of Child Health and Wellbeing.
We are right at the beginning of this journey. I am very fortunate that I have been working across Alder Hey and University for a good few years now and know a lot of the people working in both. So, the first thing I am doing is making sure I reach out to everyone I can find in both, working out how we best move paediatrics up the agenda, and what we can do to help.
If you have made it this far through the blog – well done – and if you think we should be chatting about getting you into the Liverpool Institute of Child Health and Wellbeing family, let me know (dan.hawcutt@alderhey.nhs.uk) This is a once in a generation opportunity to make a step change in paediatric research and implementation across our region, and beyond. It would be great to hear from you, even if you think I should know what you are doing!
And if you are thinking about a career in research involving children, then I need to let you know about our first event – The Academic Paediatric Association and Liverpool Institute of Child Health and Wellbeing are holding a joint 2-day meeting on April 16th and 17th 2026 – hold the date, more details to follow. Day 2 of this meeting will be specifically for trainees and junior researchers.
I hope that reading this has made you realise how excited I am about what we can achieve here. If you want to be involved, please do get in touch using the email above, this is going to be a big tent, and there will be room for everyone. What are you waiting for?”
Dan Hawcutt