The Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) Northwest London is a partnership between Chelsea and Westminster Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Imperial College London as its lead academic partner. It has been funded since 2008 and aims to engage with all healthcare providers and commissioners across northwest London. ARC Northwest London is a research programme that specifically aims to understand how evidence can be implemented to improve quality and outcomes in healthcare.

The main mechanism by which ARC Northwest London has been exploring this is through the development of 18-month quality improvement initiatives across health and social care organisations in Northwest London. The initiatives use a systematic approach to quality improvement that includes several methods, tools and approaches. The systematic approach aims to help clinical teams better understand local problems, identify potential solutions, and then test and evaluate these solutions locally before wider dissemination and spread. Multi-disciplinary clinical teams are given expert support and training by members of the ARC Northwest London team to use the systematic approach to quality improvement on their ward, clinic, or surgery.

ARC Northwest London are committed to supporting ongoing collaborations between NHS organisations in Northwest London and Imperial College London. Successful collaborations can provide a supportive infrastructure whereby interventions can be developed in response to local problems, implemented using the systematic approach to quality improvement and evaluated to demonstrate benefits to patients.