Funding has been awarded to 15 partnerships within England, which will join up some of the country’s best universities, leading innovators and local authorities to solve some of the biggest issues facing health and social care over the next five years.
The 15 new NIHR Applied Research Collaborations will ensure growth in applied health and care research in every region in England. The additional funding means will ensure its world-leading research is turned into real benefits for patients and ensure the NIHR Applied Research Collaborations work together to have a national-level impact.
Two of the 15 partnerships awarded are The NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) West Midlands, hosted by University Hospitals Birmingham NHS Foundation Trust (UHB) with academic leadership from the University of Warwick and the NIHR ARC East Midlands, which is being hosted by Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust, with academic leadership from the University of Nottingham. Both ARCs have been awarded almost £9 million each for five years by the National Institute for Health Research. These will build on the foundations of the NIHR Collaborations for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) East and West Midlands.
The NIHR ARC West Midlands aims to tackle the key issues facing the healthcare system, including the pressures of an ageing population and the increasing demands on the NHS, through collaborative working across NHS Trusts, universities, the West Midlands Academic Health Science Network and other organisations in the West Midlands. NIHR ARC West Midlands will work closely with Warwick Business School to assess barriers to service improvement, and how best these can be overcome.
The NIHR ARC East Midlands will work in collaboration with the East Midlands Academic Health Science Network to tackle the issues of mental health and wellbeing, managing multi-morbidity, building community resilience and enabling independence, data2health, ethnicity and health inequalities and translating and implementing sustainable service improvement.
The main academic partners for the Midlands NIHR ARCs are the Universities of Nottingham, Leicester, Warwick, Birmingham and Keele, with UHB and Birmingham Women’s and Children’s NHS Foundation Trust.
A full list of collaborative organisations and their research priorities can be found here
