About us
The ACRC is a multi-disciplinary research programme combining research across fields including medicine and other care professions, life sciences, engineering, informatics, data and social sciences.
How we began
In February 2020, The University of Edinburgh and Legal & General announced a major partnership to improve understanding of care in later life and to revolutionise how it is delivered. Legal & General funded the £20 million Advanced Care Research Centre (ACRC), a seven-year multi-disciplinary research programme combining research across fields including medicine and other care professions, life sciences, engineering, informatics, data and social sciences.
We assembled an interdisciplinary team of researchers from across the University of Edinburgh, Newcastle University, and University College London (UCL), bringing together top academics across all aspects of caring for those in later life. They will work on a range of interlinking work-packages that tackle themes such as understanding the person in context, creating new technologies of care and building new models of care.
The ACRC aims to enable data-driven, personalised and affordable care that delivers independence, dignity and a high quality of life for people living in their own homes or in supported care environments. Bruce Guthrie, Professor of General Practice at the University of Edinburgh’s Usher Institute, is the ACRC director and leads a cohort of researchers, across a variety of specialties, dedicated to the field of ageing and care.
Our vision
Our vision is to instigate high‐quality data‐driven, personalised and affordable care that supports the independence, dignity and quality‐of‐life of people in later life living in their own homes and in supported care environments.
Our aim is to transform care in later life using personalised care enabled by data science, artificial intelligence, assistive technologies and robotics embedded in systems of health and social care which are highly responsive to the wishes, priorities and needs of individual people in later life.
We are to host this ground-breaking collaboration with colleagues at Legal & General. This exceptional partnership will re-imagine care for the mid-21st century. As our population ages, so we need to develop innovative new approaches to provide individually-tailored care. This is the big challenge that the partners will address, bringing to bear pioneering research from the brightest academic minds across multiple disciplines to deliver creative and trusted solutions to solving real world problems.
Establishing the ACRC will revolutionise the UK’s commitment to understanding and addressing the huge issue of demographic change – part of a global challenge with significant social and economic impacts. Edinburgh’s open-sourced, data-based and cross-disciplinary approach will deliver vital positive change to ageing and care and we find this a compelling and practical vision. The partnerships we are forging with premier institutions up and down the country, from the University of Oxford to Bath University and now Edinburgh will help shift the dial in the delivery of science, technology and ageing care for many future generations to come.
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