Given the scale of problems faced by health and social services our CLAHRC West Midlands is oriented towards ‘big ticket’ topics – services where decisions have major consequences for human health. On the basis of extensive discussion with services, users and providers, capacity developed in the CLAHRC pilot and in accordance with the national CLAHRC priorities, four ‘service’ themes have been selected:

Theme 1 – Maternity and child health	Theme 2 – Prevention and early intervention in youth mental health	Theme 3 – Prevention and detection of diseases	Theme 4 – Chronic disease (integrated and holistic care)

In addition to the above four clinical topics, broadly encompassing the ‘stages of life’, we have two supporting and cross-cutting themes. Each of these provides collaborative support to the service themes as well as conducting research on the basis of learning across themes:

Theme 5 – Implementation and organisational studies	Theme 6 – Research methods