The National Institute of Academic Anaesthesia (NIAA) is working to attract major research funding into anaesthesia and related specialities. The NIAA Research Council has recently undertaken a Research Priority Setting Exercise to identify topics where anaesthetists and patients feel research will inform clinical management and offer benefit to patients. Formal research priority setting has been adopted by a number of medical specialties as a way of bringing important research questions to the attention of the major medical funding bodies and attracting substantial funding to support research into these questions. Examples include priority setting exercises undertaken by the Intensive Care Society and the UK Respiratory Research Collaborative.

The NIAA Priority Setting Exercise was supported with funding and resources from the Royal College of Anaesthetists, the Association of Anaesthetists of Great Britain and Ireland, the British Journal of Anaesthesia and the Leeds Teaching Hospitals Trust. It was led by Dr Simon Howell and Dr Jaideep Pandit and modelled on the priority setting exercises undertaken by the Intensive Care Society. Dr Duncan Young, who led the first ICS exercise gave generously of his time and advice.

In the first round of the exercise letters were sent to all Royal College Fellows and AAGBI members asking what they felt were the important unanswered questions in anaesthesia and perioperative medicine that should be addressed by clinical research studies. This generated nearly a thousand separate suggestions. These were sorted into broad research themes and a second questionnaire was sent in which we asked anaesthetists to score each question on a scale of one to ten. Over two thousand anaesthetists submitted responses to this second questionnaire. In June 2009 a panel that included anaesthetists active in research, experts in research methodology and members of the Royal College Patient Liaison Group met to consider the responses to the questionnaires. As a result of this meeting the Research Council has submitted two research questions to the Health Technology Assessment Programme (HTA) for consideration for commissioned research and will be holding further meetings with a representative of the HTA in the coming months.