The Oxford JRO was created to support collaborative clinical research across Oxford’s universities and NHS partners. As research becomes increasingly complex, our goal is to enable the Oxford JRO to accelerate the pace at which it works. This is so our clinical research teams can become more effective and better positioned to support world-leading clinical research.

The JRO Transformation programme is helping Oxford’s partners to work together more effectively. It will support efforts to improve Oxford’s performance against national clinical trial setup targets while maintaining robust governance and assurance.

By improving coordination, reducing duplication, and creating greater clarity across the research pathway, we aim to make study set-up faster, more transparent and easier to navigate for staff and research delivery partners.

The six-month JRO Transformation Programme is led by Dr Cathy Lenihan, who has joined the Oxford Academic Health Partners on secondment from the MHRA. Cathy’s appointment follows the Oxford JRO Away Day in early 2026, where nine priority areas for improvement and development were agreed.

Update – October 2026

At the autumn JRO Away Day, we met with over 100 colleagues from across the JRO. What we heard from the roundtable discussions consolidated many of the themes already arising from the JRO transformation project and gave us a strong basis for shaping the next phase of this work.

What we heard at the JRO Away Day

The key themes raised were:

Build stronger relationships across organisational boundaries, with more opportunities for equivalent teams to meet, share knowledge and solve problems together.
Improve communication, with clearer, more targeted and easier access to useful, up-to-date information, and an improved online shared presence.
Make it easier to know who does what, including clearer responsibilities, contacts, organisational maps and routes to specialist support.
Create better visibility, so colleagues can see where a study is, who owns the next action, where the dependencies lie and where delays have arisen.
Reduce unnecessary duplication and provide access to shared information, aligning processes, agreements and templates where this adds value.
Strengthen leadership and decision-making, with clearer mechanisms for resolving cross-organisational issues and visible senior support for collaboration.
Position the JRO as an enabler and connector, providing a clearer front door, connecting the right people earlier and helping to remove unnecessary friction from research.
Build trust and take a more proportionate approach to risk, supported by greater understanding of each organisation’s priorities and constraints.

Overall, we heard that the JRO should help the four partners connect, navigate, align, enable and improve, rather than becoming an additional administrative layer.

What we will do next

We will now use your feedback to develop a practical set of changes to evolve the JRO. Emerging priorities are to:

clarify the JRO’s purpose, scope and governance,
develop a communications strategy, including the JRO website,
set out the end-to-end research journey in an easy-to-understand way, linking into a clear guide to explain the Oxford health research ecosystem,
strengthen cross-partner professional networks and relationships; look into an organogram or directory,
explore how to improve shared information, systems and access to guidance,
explore common/aligned agreements, templates, agreements and processes.

The JRO programme is funded by RRDN and will conclude at the end of December 2026. Actions from the JRO away day will be combined with interim recommendations from the project, into an action plan to progress this important activity.