National Priority Consortium - Prevention with Behavioural Risk Factors
The aim of this National Priority Consortium in Prevention with Behavioural Risk Factors is to work across all 15 ARCs and with national stakeholders to reduce ill health and prevent premature mortality.
We will do this by identifying and prioritising evidence-based interventions and supporting multi-site implementation and evaluation.
This National Priority Area is led by the NIHR ARC North East and North Cumbria (NENC) and NIHR ARC West Midlands (WM) and the programme involves all 15 ARCs from across England.
It seeks to galvanise collaborative efforts across the NIHR ARCs to tackle some of the highest priority challenges the health and care system is facing, and will face, over the coming years.
Working collaboratively with ARCs across the country, the programme will deliver further research into factors which influence and contribute to people living a longer, healthier life through both primary and secondary disease prevention.
This will include promoting healthier childhoods and reducing multi-morbidities, obesity and mental ill-health across the life course.
Work will support the Government’s ‘Grand Challenge’ objective to support people to enjoy at least five extra healthy, independent years of life by 2035, while narrowing the gap between the experience of the richest and poorest.
It is part of an overall £13.25 million national investment from the NIHR to fund a total of seven ‘national priority’ research programmes which will help solve some of the most pressing issues facing health and social care across the country.
The unique infrastructure and breadth of expertise provided by the NIHR ARCs will help ensure that our world-leading applied research can help transform the organisation and delivery of health, public health and care – leading to real benefits for patients, carers and the public at all levels.
The Programme Lead is Professor Ashley Adamson, Newcastle University – Prevention Lead for the ARC North East and North Cumbria.
Our consortium objectives are to:
- Develop a cross-ARC national prevention consortium including regional and national policy and practice and public stakeholders
- To embed principles of co-production, knowledge generation, knowledge sharing/mobilisation and implementation
- To work with stakeholders to establish shared priorities for prevention, including behavioural risk factors, and to identify evidence-based ‘best bet’ interventions to address these priorities
- To conduct high quality multi-site applied research and implementation of interventions addressing prevention priorities
- To utilise extensive networks to ensure wide dissemination of evidence, and support implementation across health and care systems.
Our five shared priority areas are:
- Healthy start and healthy places
- Primary and secondary prevention in obesity
- Smoking, alcohol, opioid and drug use disorders
- Domestic violence/intimate partner abuse
- Mental health, self-harm and suicide.
As part of this work, five key research projects will be delivered. They are:
- Supporting the NHS Long-term plan: An evaluation of the implementation and impact of hospital-based tobacco services. This project is led by researchers from the ARC North East and North Cumbria, and supported by ARC West, ARC West Midlands, ARC Yorkshire and Humber, ARC Greater Manchester, ARC South London, ARC North Thames)
- Evaluation of the national roll-out of the NHS Enhanced Service Incentive for weight management in primary care. (This project is led by researchers from the ARC Oxford Thames Valley, supported by with ARC North East and North Cumbria, ARC West, ARC Kent, Surrey and Sussex and ARC West Midlands)
- Effectiveness of NHS-based Multi-tiered Lifestyle Interventions to Achieve Type 2 Diabetes Prevention Across Glycemic Risk Tiers. (This project is led by ARC North West London, and also involves ARC West Midlands and ARC East Midlands)
- A mixed-methods evaluation of cross-regional workplace health initiatives including a cluster randomised controlled trial (cRCT) of a behaviour change intervention. (This project is led by ARC West Midlands with ARC North West London and ARC North East and North Cumbria)
We are also collaborating on the following jointly-funded project led by the Child Health and Maternity Consortium.
This page will continue to be updated as projects progress.
If you have any questions about this work, please email Ruth Wilson, Consortia Manager – ruth.wilson@newcastle.ac.uk