Huge advances have been made in health care over the last century. More recently, it was discovered that many people do not receive treatments of proven value and that treatments are not always administered safely. Sometimes, even the basics, such as communication with patients/carers, are poor. ‘Service delivery research’ helps us understand why people do not receive safe and effective treatment and tests ways to support frontline staff in delivering the best care. This is the research we will do in our Centre.
We will make sure that changes made to services are informed by evidence; work with service providers and the public to design service changes; and evaluate changes by making observations in the service before, during and after the changes are made.
One major issue we will address is the coordination of care. People often receive care in different places: GP surgeries, their own homes, care homes, hospitals and community clinics. Patients and carers have described that care is not joined-up and people delivering care have told us that coordinating care is a challenge. We will look at ways care can be better integrated to provide improved outcomes and a better experience for patients. We understand that patients all have different circumstances and preferences, so we want to develop processes to enable people to make decisions about their care that are right for them.
Our 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 in five years’ time the outcome will be better health and a service in which every pound of the public’s contribution goes on services that use the best evidence of what works. The results we obtain will be shared around the world so that people everywhere can benefit from what we learn.
Our work builds on research conducted by our predecessors, the NIHR Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) for West Midlands, and the CLAHRC Birmingham and Black Country pilot.
