As part of a national initiative, we are seeking to employ early career GPs for up to 8 hours/month to link with the CRN primary care teams based at Birmingham, Keele and Warwick universities. If you are interested in applying, please contact Michaela Handley Michaela.handley@nihr.ac.uk for further details, expressions of interest to be received by Friday 15th September 2017.

Smoking remains the leading cause of ill health and mortality, at an estimated cost to the NHS of about £6 billion. Stop Smoking Services (SSSs) in England offer intensive advice and support to smokers motivated to quit, and smokers attending have a higher chance of succeeding in a quit attempt than if they attempted to quit alone. However the proportion of smokers using the SSS has been less than 5%, and the number is falling each year. In the Start2quit trial we developed an intervention to persuade and motivate more smokers to seek, or accept, help to quit.

Since its inception in 2006, the NIHR has significantly increased the scale of clinical research in the NHS, particularly through the Clinical Research Network. The enthusiastic engagement of NHS clinicians is an essential condition for sustaining and building on this success, particularly given the many competing demands on clinician time and resources.
These awards are for members of the Royal College of General Practitioners (RCGP) and recognise outstanding contributions and innovations of NHS general practices and First5® GPs to the conduct of NIHR Clinical Research Network Portfolio studies in a primary care setting.

A study by researchers from across the UK, funded by Action Medical Research, is aiming to discover whether treating asthmatic children according to their genetic status can improve their quality of life and asthma control..

Chronic Headache Education and Self-management Study (CHESS) is a multi-centre, randomised controlled trial evaluating an education and self-management support programme for people living with chronic headaches (headache ≥ 15 days/month for ≥ 3 months).

STILTS2 assesses the genetic basis of thinness. identification of genes that contribute to thinness may provide further insights into the regulation of body weight and obesity resistance, which may lead to rational preventative and therapeutic strategic for weight disorders.

Image courtesy of Grant Cochrane at FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Children with underlying medical conditions such as asthma, diabetes and cerebral palsy are ‘at risk’ of becoming more unwell from bacterial infections if they get flu. ARCHIE is a double-blind randomised placebo-controlled trial to look at the effect of giving the antibiotic co-amoxiclav to ‘at risk’ children within five days of them becoming ill with flu or influenza-like illness.