About PenCLAHRC

What is PenCLAHRC?

PenCLAHRC is the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) South West Peninsula. We are a partnership of NHS Trusts across Cornwall, Devon and Somerset, plus the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth.

Our five year grant from the NIHR is matched by an equal amount of match funding, the majority of which is provided in kind by our University partners. We also receive some match funding from the South West Academic Health Science Network (AHSN), other NHS bodies and charities.

What we do

PenCLAHRC has three key objectives:

1. To increase the volume and quality of patient-focused research in the South West

2. To improve health outcomes by more effective use of evidence to drive health services

3. To increase capacity within the health economy to use and generate evidence

Our model of partnership working across the whole research and practice continuum aims to address both the much discussed research-into-practice gap and the equally important practice-into-research gap.

Download our flyer (pdf) for a summary of what we do.

Our research

PenCLAHRC research falls under five main themes, each with its own academic lead. Summaries of the key aims of each theme and examples of associated projects are shown on our Research Themes page. Details of current and completed projects can be found on the Research and Projects pages.

Research Theme Leads

Person-Centred Care	Professor Nicky Britten and Professor Richard Byng
Mental Health and Dementia	Professor Chris Dickens and Dr Joel Town
Diagnostics and Stratified Medicine	Professor Chris Hyde
Healthy People, Healthy Environments	Professor Charles Abraham
Evidence for Policy and Practice	Professor Ken Stein

The PenCLAHRC model

In order to maximise the impact of our current NIHR grant, which runs from 2014 - 2018, the PenCLAHRC model is based on spending the core grant on infrastructure (namely staff, but also essential functions such as patient and public involvement) and to use this resource to support the development of external grant applications in order to fund larger research projects.

During the first five years of PenCLAHRC (2008 – 2013) this approach secured £17.5m in external grant funding. An internal evaluation (pdf) of this five year pilot phase was carried out to learn from our experiences and to inform the direction of the current NIHR grant.

Who we are The CLAHRC network