Table 5

Summary of issues and potential approaches for building up UK dementia research capacity

Key issues	Options for addressing them
1. Tackling bottlenecks in the transition from PhD to postdoctoral positions and from postdoctoral to independent investigator positions	Dementia-specific funding for fellowships and lectureships ‘Rising star’ fellowships for researchers with high potential to establishing small research groups Support professional skills-development programmes such as leadership training and project management Enhance scale of PhD studentships for some professions with a notable lack of early-stage opportunities (eg, allied health professions, nursing)
2. Long-term sustainability of existing dementia research centres, networks and partnerships	Address succession planning for key individuals Develop a legacy plan together with host universities
3. Attract researchers from diverse fields to collaborative dementia research efforts (ie, to research teams and networks) to support interdisciplinary collaboration	Problem-driven grants Grants with specification for partnership between researchers from different disciplines
4. Coordinate of investments across initiatives and funders and improve the cost-efficiency, effectiveness and sustainability of dementia research capacity investments	At a national level, consider balance of diseases supported; basic, applied, clinical and health services research on dementia; and prevention, treatment and care-focused research within the dementia research funding portfolio Learn from evaluation of current and prior investments into dementia research capacity-building, and from the experiences of other fields and countries