 The ILD is the Institute for Lifecourse Development, which is a new institute based in the Faculty of Education, Health and Human Sciences at the University of Greenwich. So the ILD was created to bring together the strengths within our faculty and also our fantastic partnerships. It's one of the few faculties in the country that integrates education and health. To address some of the bigger complex issues that we have. Particularly the UN Global Goals for Research, with a specific focus on good health, good education and addressing inequalities. The idea behind the ILD is really to draw people together within our faculty, but also thinking about how our research can then translate into real world impact and real world practice. A great opportunity to put us all in a supportive framework and structure that gives more cohesion and direction to the work that we do as well. We have long term ambitions for the growth of research in this university and the reason is that the challenges that we are trying to address and resolve with this research are going to be with society for a very significant period of time. They are not going to go away. Integrated care is about care that is provided that crosses boundaries. So it crosses from hospitals into primary care or it can also include crossing agencies. So crossing the health service into education, into social care. And that's why there's such a good link with integrated care and the institute. The institute is very much about interdisciplinary research. The expertise that the institute has is drawn from the faculty and the faculty has expertise that spans education, social work, psychology, as well as our health provision, including primary care nursing. So the expertise that we have within the faculty is very much aligned with integrated care and the institute to that end is very well placed to respond to the agenda around integrated care. The institute's main goals are to generate bigger impacts. So essentially take research off the shelves and put it into practice. But it doesn't just impact on the practice of an individual profession. It impacts on all the professions working together to solve the problems. So working right from prenatally all the way through to old age with midwives, with early years, professions, health visitors, teachers, social workers, councillors, all working together to try and help those people. So the institute will have six centres. The centre for inequalities, the centre for workforce development, the centre for chronic illness and ageing, the centre for thinking and learning, the centre for mental health and the centre for vulnerable children and families. So one of the important things that the institute will be doing will be launching a series of public lectures to talk about the big issues. We'll be hosting continuing professional development courses for professionals and for academics. So we have fabulous facilities for undertaking research both in Greenwich and on our campus at Avery Hill. We have brilliant neurodevelopmental laboratories at Greenwich. We have observation suites. We have EEG and eye tracking equipment. And in Avery Hill we're investing in a new simulation suite, which will allow all health professions to be trained in the latest techniques. And we're investing 1.6 million in new equipment in those simulation suite laboratories. What we want to do is work with researchers, academics, as well as practitioners and policymakers, so that the research we do translates into the real world and makes a positive societal change. So in the institute and in the centre we have a diverse team of individuals who work closely together in order to tackle these issues. So we have early career researchers as well as PhD students, postgraduate students who, via their research, help us understand in depth some of these issues and create better policies in order to allow us to have real world impact. And it's highly likely, in fact I would expect, that there's overlap across other centres as well, because of the, you know, where there's inequalities, that usually has a detrimental effect on health and education. A partnership between us and people that we work with, so it's not a one-way street where we're just conducting some research. It's about thinking, well, the implications of this research mean that actually there are key issues that we need to address. We're very well placed in terms of having very good connections with organisations and other institutions worldwide. A lot of these areas are areas where the UK has international leadership and we contribute as a university to this international leadership and we want to make sure that not only we are making a difference to our local communities but also that we're making a difference internationally. But most of the real problems that society faces cannot be solved by a single researcher in a given discipline. Very typically a lot of the key challenges will require expertise coming from a variety of different disciplines and we see that, for instance, when dealing with vulnerable children or when dealing with vulnerable people, where you have a combination of problems that relate to health, that relate to mental health, but also that relate to social deprivation, also that relate to education and it's very often important to bring experts from different areas in order to provide real solutions in the real world. We are a university that has a very aspirational outlook for its research. We want to make sure that research in this university continues to grow, not just in terms of quantity but particularly in terms of excellence. But it does so in a way that addresses real challenges that are out there in society. So the institute is part of a bigger picture of developing the research strengths of the university of growing our research capacity. So I think the broadness and inclusiveness that the Institute of Life Course Development is creating is a fantastic opportunity to have all sorts of people involved, whether that's members of the public, students, partners in government, healthcare, education, anyone with a vested interest I think it has a great opportunity for and it's opening up the door for people to bring their own knowledge, skills and experience to the discussions but also to bring their own interests and to help us think about what are the issues that we want to look at within our centres. So we have an extensive range of partners that we currently liaise with and have strong and established links with and we'll continue to work with those partners within the context of the institute and we can work with those partners in terms of exploring with them what their needs are in terms of research and also by sharing with them through seminars, through conferences and working so that they will also share with us what their work is and also through our students as well because our students will be attached to centres within the institute. If we think about it from the point of view that as an individual if we become unwell and we need a health service, healthcare intervention as an individual we are a member of a wider family for example so if we take an older person with dementia or we have a younger child or an adolescent that has specific healthcare needs each of those individuals will be members of a family so when we're looking at providing healthcare and health services to for example an older person with dementia we need to remember that person, that patient has grandchildren, their own children their own children are probably providing care to them and to their children so that these individuals are interacting with a whole range of health services to provide them with support and that can in itself be very very daunting but in terms of a life course perspective I think it's important to consider that within population health we're not just looking at the individual who has a healthcare need we need to look at it in terms of the whole wider family and the services and the sector that surrounds that. I think one of the things that's key is that the different professional groups that work across different sectors understand what each other's roles are and a way to overcome some of those barriers because there are barriers to interprofessional working is interprofessional education and that's where the Institute comes in it can provide a really strong vehicle for interprofessional education again drawing on all our partners and the links that we have we have the ability to bring different key players from different sectors into a room at the same time who can share their knowledge with others but also learn from each other and that's what will be key. What the Institute means for our partners and our potential partners is an opportunity for them to engage with us in the development of new projects but also for them to present us with challenges and things that they want us to help them with and how we can help everybody across generations to fulfil their own lives and help other people around them to have good lives too.