The Dinwoodie Charitable Company operates within England with the principal objective of benefiting patients by providing facilities for the further education of doctors and their teams and by funding research into novel education techniques and strategies.
While many of our successful collaborations have involved the provision of educational infrastructure, we are keen to interpret our aims flexibly and to support innovative projects that address gaps in education or approaches to patient care that do not yet attract mainstream funding and that we identify as potential best practice for the future. Projects should be seen as potentially scaleable at regional, national or international level, with patient benefit as a likely outcome. Funding will normally be on a matched basis to demonstrate commitment from the organisation applying. Our contributions are typically in the range of £50,000 to £1m.
Our current priorities and interests include:
- Innovation in educational technology and processes. It is likely that this will be at the level of “proof of concept”
- All aspects of medical professionalism and leadership
- Patient and Clinician education and communication, including the area of shared decision making
- Projects related to new models of care
Factors which will help to attract funding include:
- Sustainability, both in terms of the project itself (i.e. the ability to provide for future operating costs etc.) and the organisation backing it (i.e. that standards of care, finance and the backing of leadership are appropriate)
- A positive “business case”, where benefits or savings will exceed the investment of the project costs
- A planned pathway from “proof of concept” to implementation with input from potential users; this may require alignment with the strategy of the NHS or other umbrella organisation
- Benefits to patients which, where feasible, are measureable with a commitment to provide this information to the Charity after implementation
It may be helpful to know that the charity will not fund:
- Basic scientific research unless related to medical education
- The “on-costs” of infrastructure projects (maintenance, refurbishment, replacement and salaries)
- Undergraduate education (although consideration might be given to innovative proposals from new medical schools)
- Projects in vulnerable institutions unless these are part of an agreed turn-around process