‘World-class’ health research across East Midlands to continue

The organisation was formed in 2014 and will continue to at least 2024 thanks to £9million of funding from the Government’s Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC). The achievements have been celebrated in this new brochure.

NIHR CLAHRC EM will now be called NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) East Midlands.

The funding enabling more vital work to take place to tackle the region’s health and care priorities, putting in place more evidenced-based frameworks to drive up standards of care and save time and money.

ARC East Midlands (EM) will be hosted by Nottinghamshire Healthcare NHS Foundation Trust and work in collaboration with the East Midlands Academic Health Science Network. There will also be significant match funding from partners, including the University of Leicester and University of Nottingham, to support the organisation. It has bases at University of Nottingham and University of Leicester.

The clinical themes ARC EM will focus on include:

• Building Community Resilience and Enabling Independence
• Mental Health and Wellbeing
• Managing Multimorbidity

The organisation will be working on the following cross-cutting themes:

• Translating and Implementing Sustainable Service Improvement
• Ethnicity and Health Inequalities
• Data2Health

Additionally, ARC EM will also have a remit to lead nationally on research into black and minority ethnic communities and multimorbidity thanks to its expertise in these areas.

Professor Kamlesh Khunti, who is Director of NIHR CLAHRC East Midlands and is also a Professor of Primary Care, Diabetes and Vascular Medicine at the University of Leicester, said: “The launch of ARC East Midlands represents a new era in applied health research for the East Midlands as this new funding will allow us to continue our excellent work to improve NHS and social care. 

“We are also proud to be leading nationally on multimorbidity and equality, diversity and inclusion of under-represented groups, areas where we have dedicated expertise and a track record in delivering cutting-edge research.”

Work carried out by NIHR CLAHRC East Midlands includes helping to prevent type 2 diabetes by embedding an education programme designed to help people avoid the condition. The project has provided learning which has been used in the bidding process, refinement and implementation of the National Diabetes Prevention Programme in the East Midlands.

In April last year, the organisation also continued to support the rollout of a risk score for type 2 diabetes in South Asian languages with the release of a Panjabi version following Gujarati and Bengali versions.

Other successes include implementing and assessing an online tool that assists diagnosing children with ADHD, which initial evaluation shows can lower NHS costs by 22 per cent and also reduce delays to diagnosis of the condition by an average of 145 days.

In another study, an evaluation of an exercise programme to help prevent older people from falling was completed with the results having been turned into an implementation toolkit and shared nationally.

The funding is part of a £135 million commitment made by DHSC to drive improvements to healthcare by helping to embed the learning from research into the frontline of healthcare sooner.