The £3.7m five-year programme, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research, will begin in May 2026. It aims to investigate the effectiveness and implementation of ‘workplace health and wellbeing initiatives that are free at the point of use to workplaces’, known as WHISPAs. These are offered freely to employers and funded by local government or voluntary and community organisations. The research will focus on small and medium-sized organisations with less than 250 staff.

When a new research project starts to gather momentum, the pressure to deliver can build quickly. Timelines move fast, and there’s often a long list of deliverables - events to organise, budgets to track, team members to coordinate, stakeholders and advisory board members to keep updated – with the responsibility often falling to the Principal Investigator, unless additional research support is in place. That’s where a great Project Officer makes all the difference.

As the year draws to a close and things start to slow down (at least a little), it feels like a good moment to pause and reflect. Not just on what’s been achieved, but on what’s been learned along the way — about the business, about growth, and about how we want to work.