The Story of HaemSTAR: From an Idea to a Network

In 2017, at the BSH ASM in Brighton, a group of NIHR CRN trainee representatives launched HaemSTAR: Mike Desborough, Claire Burney, Dave Tucker, Sarah Wharin, Alex Rampotas, Zara Sayar and Pip Nicolson among its pioneers. The idea traces back a year earlier, to 2016, when Professor Cheng Hock Toh was chair of the NIHR Haematology Clinical Research Network (CRN). It was Cheng Hock's idea to bring trainee representatives from each NIHR region onto the national CRN committee, with each trainee supported by their regional LCRN lead. His original intention was straightforward but far-sighted: to help trainees understand how the UK research landscape actually worked, so that they would go on to be more effective within it as consultants. What began as a committee structure quickly became something more: Cheng Hock took an active, personal role in mentoring these trainees, and under his guidance the idea grew beyond the committee into a standalone trainee network. The model was inspired by the trainee research networks that had already taken root in anaesthetics, such as RAFT nationally and SWARM regionally. There were further motivations behind turning this committee role into a fully-fledged network: to educate trainees in how to become principal investigators, at a time before the associate PI scheme existed to do this formally; to grow medical (non-malignant) haematology clinical research, which lagged well behind its haemato-oncology counterpart; and to devolve clinical trial opening and recruitment beyond the traditional tertiary and quaternary referral centres and out into district general hospitals. That network took its own name (with all of this credit going to Dan Hart): HaemSTAR.

From the outset, HaemSTAR's ethos was collaboration and equality, trainees and consultants working together on projects that mattered to everyday clinical practice. That ethos was quickly put to the test by the network's first wave of national audits and studies, and it was through these early projects that HaemSTAR found its shape.

TRAIT and MASCOT were among the first studies to run through the network, giving trainees across the country their first taste of coordinating a multi-centre project through regional representatives rather than a single academic centre. None of this would have got off the ground without established researchers willing to hand over the reins: Nichola Cooper and Charlotte Bradbury, among others, took the risk of letting trainees loose on their own studies, lending credibility and support at a crucial early stage. FLIGHT followed, further testing how quickly a trainee-led network could help deliver and report a national Randomised Controlled Trial. The IVIg Flash Mob audit (supported with funding and mentorship through the Katie Bolam Award from the Scientific Academic Coagulation Consortium in 2018) showed the network's ability to answer a live clinical practice question rapidly, capturing a snapshot of UK-wide practice in a way that would have been impossible for any single unit to achieve alone.

Each of these projects stretched the network's capabilities in a different way, and each exposed gaps that needed addressing: how to recruit and support regional representatives, how to maintain data quality across dozens of sites, how to keep momentum through changes in trainee leadership. Rather than being setbacks, these growing pains became the raw material for HaemSTAR's evolution, with structures, training, and support refined project by project.

Kickstarter funding for the network came, fittingly, from the thrombosis and haemostasis community itself. The ISTH SSC Liverpool meeting in 2012 (the 58th Annual SSC Meeting) provided pump-priming money that paid for data analysis and publication fees on early projects such as the TTP Flash Mob. A decade later, the ISTH Congress in London in 2022 provided further seed funding, establishing the ISTH Legacy Fund, which has since been used to help haematology trainees and resident doctors travel to conferences, and to kickstart the HaemRYNE network in Nigeria.

Throughout this growth, Cheng Hock remained closely involved, championing HaemSTAR within the NIHR, for example by insisting on NIHR-sponsored BSH ASM attendance for HaemSTAR members. When he stepped down as NIHR CRN chair to become RCP Academic Vice President, he passed the baton to successive chairs, Dan Hart and Gill Lowe, while continuing to mentor from the sidelines. His consistent instinct to devolve credit to those doing the work is stamped through HaemSTAR's culture to this day.

What started as a handful of regional trainee representatives on a national committee is now a well-established research network, its progress measured not just in publications but in the clinicians it has trained to lead national studies of their own.