The NIHR has recently announced a merger of two major research programmes: from January 2012 the Health Services Research programme and the Service Delivery and Organisation programme will merge to form the new Health Services and Delivery Research programme.

The merger will “enable the research production community to better address the cross cutting needs of NHS from the patient to the manager. Bringing communities of interest together aims to better address the second translational gap in knowledge to the benefit of patients and the public.” In other words, the NIHR sees a strategic level benefit in merging these two programmes which have significant areas of overlap in terms of their aims and the research they fund. The new combined programme will “enable it to fund large studies of national and international importance that would be beyond the capacity of most other funders.”

This shift towards combined, strategic funding of larger grants mirrors a similar process currently ongoing within research councils which are concentrating more funding on longer, larger grants addressing key challenges.

The funded research will fall into one of two workstreams: researcher-led and commissioned. The first, researcher-led workstream will fund research into the “quality, appropriateness, effectiveness, equity and patient experience of health services”. The second stream will focus on evaluations of NHS interventions which have the potential to improve NHS effectiveness. Applicants to both strands will need to indicate how the proposed work benefits patients and the NHS.

The new programme will maintain the existing budgets of the existing HSR and SDO programmes, and research projects of up to £2M will be funded through calls to be announced in January and February 2012. If you would like to be kept informed of the latest developments in this scheme, you should email netcomms@southampton.ac.uk to be added to the mailing list.