Northumbria's health and life sciences courses ranked among best in the world

Northumbria University’s health and life sciences courses now rank in the top 500 in the world, according to the Times Higher Education’s World University Rankings 2018.

The Rankings list the top 1,000 universities in the world and is Times Higher Education’s biggest league table to date. It is the only global university performance table to judge research-intensive universities across all of their core missions – teaching, research, knowledge transfer and international outlook.

Northumbria features in the top 500 in the 2018 Times Higher Education in both the Clinical, Pre-Clinical & Health subject ranking and in the Life Sciences subject ranking. The University performed particularly well in the metrics for research citations and industry income respectively.

Key strength in research in the area of nursing, midwifery and health includes the work of The Northern Hub for Veterans and Military Families Research, which has carried out research into substance misuse amongst veterans and is being used to improve services to support them. The Hub is also developing a smartphone app with a US software company providing details of services available for UK military veterans as well as being used to produce a map of need. The University is also leading on a project to improve patient safety education, SLIPPS (Shared Learning from Practice to improve Patient Safety), drawing on the real experiences of health and social care students in work placements across five European countries.

Northumbria also has excellent partnerships with industry, with income being used for research in particular in biological services and sport science. This includes Glaxo Smithkline plc, Palintest Ltd and the British Sailing Team.

The University is ranked top 50 in the UK for research power and had the fourth largest increase in quality research funding, according to the results of the 2014 Research Excellence Framework, which measures the quality of research undertaken in universities. More than 80% of research power in Allied Health Professions and Nursing were ranked as being of ‘world-leading’ or ‘internationally excellent’ quality, with sport and exercise science research power ranked in the top 30 for excellence.

As well as attracting significant numbers of international students and staff in these disciplines, the University works closely with more than 500 partner universities, colleges and schools across the world. Northumbria’s partnership outreach sees the University partner with education institutions across all six major continents with partners in countries including USA, Canada, Australia, China, Japan and India as well as nearly 200 partner organisations in Europe through the Erasmus+ programme.

An extensive range of professional bodies accredit Northumbria’s courses. These include the Nursing and Midwifery Council, the Royal Society of Chemistry, Ofsted, the Institute of Biomedical Science and the Chartered Society of Forensic Science and Association for Nutrition.

Professor Dianne Ford, Pro Vice-Chancellor for Health and Life Sciences at Northumbria University, said: “The world rankings show the significant strides we have made in our world class research and in our industry links. They clearly demonstrate our global reputation in delivering academic excellence and are a real credit to Health and Life Sciences at Northumbria. We continue to recruit high quality students and excellent staff to what I believe is one of the best Universities in the world.”

For more information on the THE World University Rankings, visit www.timeshighereducation.com/world-university-rankings/by-subject.

For more information on courses and research at Northumbria University visit www.northumbria.ac.uk