7 January 2016
Director Jenny Donovan explains the thinking behind our 2016 call for proposals with a focus on integration and optimal care, which launched on 7 January 2016.
NIHR CLAHRC West has now been up and running at full steam for over a year. It has been an interesting experience setting up a collaborative research partnership across NHS, higher education, patient and public involvement, third sector, and local authority organisations. I am extremely grateful for the help we have received from colleagues in these organisations who have been incredibly supportive when so busy with many other pressures. It is clear that there is a great collective will to achieve improvements in health across our area, and high levels of interest in how research can drive any changes that are needed.
I am delighted to say that we in the CLAHRC West are now working on over 30 research and implementation projects initiated by colleagues in our partner organisations, running research training courses, and actively encouraging greater patient and public involvement. Details of all our projects are available on our new-look, user-friendly website.
Today’s edition of the newsletter is the first of regular reports about what we are doing. Its aim is to encourage your collaboration and involvement with us – please sign up if you have not already. This first edition is also an opportunity to launch and explain the thinking behind the 2016 call for proposals with its focus on integration and optimal care.
Some of our first projects will be completed over the next six months, and so we have enough capacity to launch a new call for proposals today. The 2016 call is based on soundings from our partner organisations about some of the key issues facing the local health economy that we, as a research organisation, could contribute to. We have also had a clear steer from our funding body, NIHR, that we need to increase our involvement in implementation – using existing evidence or newly collected data to guide proposed changes and evaluating the impact of putting such changes into practice, for example.
Having listened to our partners, including the West of England Academic Health Science Network and NIHR Clinical Research Network, we are focusing the 2016 call on two areas of importance to the local health economy – promoting integration and delivering optimal care. NHS and public health budgets are extremely tight, and so we are looking for proposals that will save or free-up resources locally while ensuring that patient and public health outcomes continue to be improved.
We hope to receive proposals that promote evidence-based integration across local organisations that lead to greater levels of coordinated working and integration through care pathways. In many parts of the West, there are existing partnerships promoting integration – such as the Health Integration Teams in Bristol and other integrative initiatives across Gloucestershire, Bath, Somerset and Swindon. This part of the call is seeking proposals for taking the next steps with integration – putting evidence-based ideas into practice, or collecting data that will quickly lead to health improvements.
In this part of the call, we are looking for proposals that use research evidence to promote optimal care – so that people in the West can receive the most effective care in the right place and at the right time. Research has shown that people with similar characteristics and health problems can receive different services and treatments. This means that many people are receiving optimal care, but some will not be receiving what they need and others will be receiving investigations or treatments that they do not need and are not beneficial. In this call, we will prioritise proposals that focus on optimising care and improving outcomes by identifying opportunities to reduce or stop investigations or interventions with evidence that indicates that they are not effective or needed. We have chosen this area in particular because it has the capacity to improve outcomes while freeing up resources – and requires high quality research evidence and enhanced collaboration between patients, clinicians and commissioners.
Patients and members of public are welcome to respond to the new call for proposals. In addition, we will very shortly announce plans from our coordinated patient and public involvement (PPI) team, People in Health West of England, for opportunities for patients and members of the public to propose and develop research ideas. We will be running workshops across the West of England to support this process. This will be linked to the existing 2016 call, but will also encourage the development of other ideas and proposals. If you are interested, contact Kim Thomas on 0117 342 1251 or kim.thomas@nihr.ac.uk to find out more.
We start 2016 with NHS organisations and local authority public health departments under extreme pressure to meet the demands on their services. At the same time, we have a tremendous opportunity to capitalise on the strong will to work together across our area to improve health and well-being. It is the role of CLAHRC West to provide research evidence and work with local organisations to improve health across the West. We are very keen to make our contribution.