14 July 2019


Our membership is growing and becoming increasingly diverse, and so the organisation’s involvement in research needs to be relevant to the whole multidisciplinary team, benefiting patients of all ages and with all rheumatological conditions. Listening to member feedback, our targeted Research Funding Call for 2019 requested applications from members who had little or no substantial involvement with research to date and were unlikely to have the opportunity to do so without such an award.


Research areas that we prioritised for support included proposals using our data, important research areas identified by members including health services research, chronic pain (including fibromyalgia) and rare diseases along with paediatric and adolescent rheumatology.


After reviewing all the proposals, our panel has decided to fund five research project applications.


Congratulations to the following members and their winning projects:


  • Claire Holmes: Can models of fibromyalgia care be shared across organisations to improve patient self-management, pain medication usage, work retention and physical performance?

  • Mrinalini Dey: Assessing the utility of point-of-care testing of serum and synovial fluid to discriminate septic from non-septic monoarthritis in the acute hot joint presentation

  • Hannah Jethwa: A prospective longitudinal single-centre study to determine if the performance of the Psoriasis Epidemiology Screening Tool (PEST) can be improved by the addition of serum bone-turnover biomarkers to screen for psoriatic arthritis in patients with cutaneous psoriasis

  • Jordan Tsigarides: Investigating Virtual Immersive Experiences in the Management of Chronic Widespread Pain (the VIPA study)

  • Varvara Choida: Development and validation of quantitative imaging biomarkers (QIB) in JIA


We look forward to tracing the career development outcomes for these individuals as a result of our awards – as well as any research outputs in the form of posters, presentations or papers - from the subjects they have chosen.