Research supported by funding from the NIHR CLAHRC for South West Peninsula, has concluded that it would be a safe and cost-effective strategy to screen people with type 2 diabetes who have not yet developed diabetic retinopathy, for the disease once every two years instead of annually. The study published on-line in Diabetes Car, predicts savings of around 25 per cent based on standard assumptions of screening costs for the Royal Devon & Exeter Hospital.

The Department of Health wishes to contract with an institution for the part-time services (2.5 days per week) of a person to be appointed Programme Director of the NIHR Programme Grants for Applied Research.

Programme grant awards are made to NHS organisations to a maximum of £2 million over a period of up to five years. These support balanced teams of leading researchers, from the NHS and academia working together, to undertake programmes of applied research with practical application for the benefits of patients and the NHS in the short to medium term. Over 130 applications have been supported to date, and total funding committed is over £200 million.

The contract will initially be of three years duration, to be reviewed at two years. The Department of Health will reimburse the successful applicant’s employing institution for their time commitment.

The closing date for applications is 22 June 2012. Interviews are due to take place on 12 July 2012.

Compounds found in curry are being investigated as a way of improving drug response in patients with advanced bowel cancer. The new study carried out by scientists at the Cancer Research UK and NIHR’s Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre in Leicester will investigate whether tablets containing curcumin – found in the spice turmeric – can be safely added to the standard treatment for bowel cancer that has spread.

The NIHR Research for Patient Benefit programme is increasing the funding available for applied health research projects from up to £250,000 to up to £350,000 per project. This change will take effect from Competition 19, which launches in July 2012.

The funding limit of up to £250,000 applies to Competition 18, which closes on Friday 25 May 2012. Researchers applying for Competition 18 will not be eligible for the increased funding.

Research published by the NIHR Health Technology Assessment programme, shows that using endosonography is a more effective, cheaper and less invasive method of staging lung cancer patients. The research led by Papworth Hospital NHS Foundation Trust, working with partners in Belgium and the Netherlands compared standard investigation techniques with the new endosonography  technique to determines the stage the cancer has reached.

The NIHR has launched an update to the UK Clinical Trials Gateway that significantly increases and improves the amount of information available to patients, clinicians and the public about Clinical Trials. The Gateway brings together information about current health research trials from a variety of sources which can then be searched to find out more about the trials that are taking place in the United Kingdom. The latest update builds on the original version but increases the amount of simple and easy to understand summary information describing what each trial is doing.

Versions of the UK Clinical Trials Gateway are also now available for the iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

A large study that examined the costs and safety of giving birth at home, in a stand-alone midwifery unit, a hospital unit staffed by midwives or in a full hospital maternity unit with on-site obstetricians, has found that it is safe and cost effective for women to give birth at home. The study found that for women who had previous children, planned birth in an obstetric unit was the most expensive with planned birth at home the cheapest, and that the four settings had comparable risks of adverse birth outcomes, although first-time births at home were more likely to have them. The study published in British Medical Journal was carried out by researchers from the University of Oxford, the University of Warwick and University College London, and funded by DH’s Policy Research Programme and the NIHR’s Service Delivery and Organisation programme.

A research study published in the Journal of Public Health, has provided evidence that allowing a patient to see a particular doctor in the GP surgery has an important impact on reducing non-emergency hospital admissions. The study found that a 1% increase in the proportion of patients able to see a particular doctor was associated with a reduction of 7.6 elective admissions per year in the average-sized practice for 2006–07 and 3.1 elective admissions for 2007–08. This potentially could lead to significant annual cost savings by GP practices by reducing non-emergency admissions. The study was led and funded by the NIHR’s CLAHRC for Leicestershire, Northamptonshire and Rutland.

Individuals with better cognitive function in childhood are less likely to end up on long-term sick leave in adult life, according to new research. The findings come from a study of over 30,000 people in Britain, and suggest that long-term sick leave may be linked to individuals’ ability to deal with problems and return to work as well as their physical health or employment issues.  Individuals with better cognitive function  in childhood had a lower risk of being on long-term sick leave in adult life, even after a range of health and work factors had been taken into account. The research was funded by the MRCl and the NIHR’s Biomedical Research Centre for Mental Health at the South London and Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust and the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London.

The national newborn screening programme, which detects rare genetic disorders via bloodspot screening of newborn babies is to be expanded. Currently, the UK programme comprises just five conditions: phenylketonuria, congenital hypothyroidism, sickle cell anaemia, cystic fibrosis and medium chain acyl-CoA dehydrogenase deficiency (MCADD). The new one-year pilot scheme, which will test more than half of UK newborns, will also screen for a further five conditions: maple syrup urine disease, homocystinuria, glutaric acidaemia type 1, isovaleric acidaemia and long chain fatty acidaemia. The expansion of the screening programme is a result of a review of genetic metabolic disorders by the PHG Foundation and funded by the NIHR’s Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care, South Yorkshire which showed that using the existing screening technology had the potential ‘to reduce death and severe disability caused by these conditions in a cost-effective manner’.