The 2018 conference is hosted at the University of Oxford. The aim of the event, building on the 2017 congress, is to highlight the link between research and practice by gathering together a wide range of papers on health and health services research close to practice and/or policy. These will come from the full range of allied disciplines including primary care, acute medicine, public health, psychiatry, paediatrics, and ageing as well as economics, psychology, statistics, social science and ethics, clinical trial design, health informatics and implementation research.