NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) West Midlands

general hospital ward setting with healthcare staff

The NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) West Midlands is a five-year (2019-2024) initiative funded by the National Institute of Health Research, with matched funding from local health and social services. Our mission is to create lasting and effective partnerships across health and social care organisations, and universities (Birmingham, Keele and Warwick) in order to improve care services across the West Midlands.

Our work builds on research conducted by both the NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) for West Midlands and the CLAHRC Birmingham and Black Country pilot.

We are one of 15 ARCs across England, part of a £135 million investment by the NIHR to improve the health and care of patients and the public.

Service delivery research helps us understand why people do not receive safe and effective treatment and tests new ways to support frontline staff in delivering the best care. This is the research we do within the ARC.

At the outset, the ARC’s leadership worked in partnership with the public and our local communities, and with those who provide and deliver health and social care services, to identify four focus areas for research:

The ARC’s mission is to create a culture where close collaboration between researchers, the services and the people who use the services becomes the rule, not the exception. We are committed to ensuring that, by the end of our first five years, our region’s population will live in better health, served by a system where every pound of public funding goes on services that work.