The Institute of Naval Medicine is the main research centre and training facility of the Royal Navy Medical Service.

[citation needed] In the early 1930s induction training moved to Haslar, but other teaching and research work continued to be based at Greenwich; by that time the RMNS was engaged in 'a very large amount of highly technical work of the greatest importance to the health of the Navy', including research, analytics, pathological examinations, tropical disease investigations and vaccine making.

During the war its work continued: in the back garden of a house on Elton Road, Clevedon, in 1942 the RNMS constructed the world's first fully functional factory for the mass production of penicillin.

At the same time, the RNMS began to undertake increasingly specialised medical research in support of the Polaris submarine-launched nuclear weapons programme.

[6] Specialised research, training and radiological protection facilities were built in the grounds of Monckton House, and in 1969 the establishment was renamed the Institute of Naval Medicine.

At a safety conference on Saturday 25 March 1972 at the University of Birmingham, organised by the National Council of British Mountaineering, with around five hundred climbing experts present, Surgeon Commander Duncan Walters (August 1927 - August 2021) showed a film entitled Give Him Air,[7][8] about a swimmer in Malta that was accidentally speared in the lung by a harpoon gun.

[12] J and P Engineering Reading Ltd developed a photo-sensitive radiation detector for the institute, later sold to the National Radiological Protection Board (NRPB) in Oxfordshire and for CERN.

[13] At a conference in Aberdeen in September 1988, Surgeon Captain Ramsay Pearson, head of undersea medicine, said that recreational diving in the UK had too many accidents, due to decompression computers, which he claimed did not have built-in safety factors.

[15] As of 2005 the Institute's mission statement was 'to improve the operational capability of the Royal Navy by promoting good health and safety and maximising the effectiveness of personnel'.

Its five 'principal business areas' were: The Channel 5 documentary Survivor featured the institute, and surviving cold temperatures on the Cascade Range, on Wednesday 28 January 1998.

[17] The British Olympic coxless four men's rowing team had medical tests, with a vitalograph for lung function in 2008, later winning the gold medal in August 2012.

[18] It trained medical staff for the Naval Emergency Monitoring Team at three sites at Gare Loch, Portsmouth and Plymouth, which worked with the Nuclear Accident Response Organisation (NARO) at the Clyde Submarine Base (HMNB Clyde)[19] In 1970s, nurses in the navy trained at the navy hospitals in Gosport and Plymouth; the Royal Naval School of Nursing began around 1962, in Gosport.