Government looks to plug health research gaps
pharmafile | October 16, 2008 | News story | Research and Development |Â Â Â
The government is investing £5 million in specialist research projects on the planning and provision of health services.
The new Health Services Research (HSR) programme is designed to fund areas that fall outside the mainstream remits of the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR), Medical Research Council or Department of Health.
The NIHR, which is tasked with maintaining and managing the NHS's research infrastructure in hospitals and universities, will manage the new programme.
On-going grants will be provided for both primary work and evidence synthesis in areas either proposed by researchers or specified by the government.
The latter will be in areas of particular interest or strategic need, and will have to be approved by the programme's board.
The government is to make a formal call for interest next January but researchers can register their interest at www.hsr.nihr.ac.uk.
Public health minister Dawn Primarolo said that the money would increase service quality and patient safety.
"Health services research produces knowledge that can lead to the improvement of health policy, health systems and health care delivery, ultimately resulting in improvements in population health," she said.
Commissioning research on improving health was one of the strategic goals in the government's national Best Research for Best Health strategy.
Increased funding to support research into new products and approaches to health service provision was also a key recommendation in the Cooksey review.
The newly-allocated money will be used to green-light projects in existing specialist programmes.
These include the Health Technology Assessment programme (HTA),
the Service Delivery & Organisation programme (SDO), the Efficacy & Mechanism Evaluation programme (EME), Programme Grants for Applied Research and the Research for Patient Benefit (RfPB) programme.
"Our early work with stakeholders has highlighted a number of key areas likely to be of interest to this new programme," explained Professor Sally Davies, director general of research and development at the Department of Health.
"These include cultural and organisational issues around patient safety, making better use of existing research knowledge through modelling, and the use of existing health data to improve the planning and delivery of health services and systems."
Davies will oversee the HSR programme, with a programme director reporting to her.
It will be managed by the NIHR Evaluation, Trials and Studies Co-ordinating Centre at the University of Southampton.
