Clinical Academic Groups

A brief guide

Our services are provided through Clinical Academic Groups (CAGs). CAGs bring together clinical services, research, education and training for the benefit of patient care. Our Medical Director explains more in the following short film.

One of the main aims of CAGs is to help us become much better and quicker at using the latest research to improve the care and treatment we provide. This is about iimproving NHS care for patients by putting research findings into practice as quickly and effectively as possible. It also involves providing high quality teaching for the next generation of clinical staff and scientists.

Many people have mixed needs and will need to receive services across a number of CAGs. We are not restricting access to services or making it more difficult to move between different services. We have set up CAGs to help us to organise and manage our services, research and education and training, for the benefit of patients.

We are developing 'care pathways' across all of our services to help people to understand what they can expect from our services, what happens next and what treatment options are available to them. These 'care pathways' will provide a clear and thorough description of every stage of receiving care and treatment at SLaM. It will also mean that there will be a clear process for moving between different services, and different CAGs, if that is what someone needs.