My name’s Paul Davies and I’m Head of Sport Science & Medicine for Paralympic Sport at the English Institute of Sport (EIS), with responsibility for the strategic direction and quality assurance of EIS support to Paralympic sports and athletes.

We work in partnership with sports to determine what aspects of sport science and medicine will impact performance and we’re delivering some 1,800 hours of sport science and medicine to Paralympic athletes every month.

Whether our practitioners are embedded within a sport full-time or deliver part-time service provision across our network, my role is to work with them and the sports to ensure that we are making a performance impact by prioritising and tailoring support around each sport and individual athletes’ needs.

We have one of the world’s leading pools of sport science and medical expertise working within Paralympic sport at the EIS, so it’s vital that we aim to develop world leading practitioners by capturing and sharing Paralympic specific knowledge and expertise.

However, as with anything in elite sport, you can’t keep still and rely on your last performance. We’re working to continually develop practitioners both as part of the overall EIS inter-disciplinary network and as part of the wider Paralympic sport community, aiming to foster the specific expertise which will give GB athletes with a disability the edge in international sport.

Sharing expertise across the EIS infrastructure is vital to ensure that value continues to be added to sports who invest in the network, utilising expertise from both within and outside the organisation including collaborations with universities and key organisational partners to help drive research and support innovative practice.

With just over two years to go until the Paralympic Games in London it’s important we seize the opportunity and harness the increasing interest in Paralympic sport to increase the impact of our support even further. 

I look forward to explaining how the EIS is involved in a number of initiatives to this end in my next blog.

Paul Davies is the Head of Sport Science & Medicine for Paralympic Sport at the English Institute of Sport