Local authorities across the UK are rolling out public health initiatives—from food programmes to housing improvements—but often lack the resources to rigorously test whether they actually work. This team of researchers from the University of Edinburgh will embed themselves directly inside ten local authorities over five years, conducting rapid, flexible evaluations of these real-world interventions as they happen. The problem is that local governments rarely have the time, money, or expertise to assess their own public health efforts properly. Without robust evaluation, effective programmes go unproven and ineffective ones continue. This project fills that gap by building a dedicated, responsive evaluation team that can pivot quickly when a council needs answers. If successful, this approach could transform how local authorities make decisions about public health spending. Instead of relying on hunches or national guidelines, councils would have concrete, locally-relevant evidence on what works—whether that is a new cycle lane, a health visiting service, or a community policing initiative. The embedded knowledge broker ensures findings are not just published but actively used to shape policy. The result is a more efficient, evidence-driven public health system that delivers better outcomes for communities without wasting public money.
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The proposed Public Health Intervention Responsive Studies Team (PHIRST-Elevate) is comprised of experienced researchers from a single institution (The University of Edinburgh). We represent three research units; The Physical Activity for Health Research Centre (PAHRC), Scottish Collaboration for Public Health Research and Policy (SCPHRP), and the UoE Business School (UoEBS). PAHRC has an established track record collaborating with SCPHRP and UoEBS, including on NIHR funded evaluations. Our collective experience encompasses numerous public health topics, evaluation types and research methods including evaluations for local and national government. Our public health topic experience includes physical activity, diet, food systems, transport interventions, health visiting, family nurse partnerships, employment services, social housing and housing conditions, youth work and education, women’s and children’s services, community policing, homelessness, and green and blue spaces as well as two previous PHIRST Fusion Evaluations (COVID Champions, Employment services). We have experience in many types of evaluation including formative, process, impact and outcome, realist, scale-up, and economic. The expertise across the team covers multiple qualitative and quantitative methods as well as participatory and creative methods. Through our previous local authority (LA) evaluation experience we have developed a thorough understanding of LA contexts, requirements, and differences across the UK nations. We will aim to work with LAs and community stakeholders to identify priority evaluation objectives to support them in their public health work. In this proposal we describe our evaluation approach that would be applied to the n=10 evaluations over 5 years. Crucially (and based on our previous experiences) this approach is designed to be flexible, responsive and adaptable and can be deployed rapidly at short notice. It is a six-stage approach as follows: Stage 1: Initial contact and identification of key stakeholders Stage 2: Team and stakeholder group formation Stage 3: Evaluability assessment Stage 4: Planning for evaluation Stage 5: Conducting evaluation Stage 6: Knowledge mobilisation (Reporting evaluation) We propose an approach where an Evaluation Lead from our Team will manage an assigned evaluation with a dedicated team comprising of: a post-doctoral researcher, knowledge broker, administrator, PPI lead, and (where possible) an embedded team member in the LA. Support from the wider team and an Expert Panel of topic specialists will be provided according to need and context. Key elements of our evaluation approach include early and ongoing stakeholder engagement, a team member embedded within the LA, and strong, devolved Public and Patient Involvement (PPI). We have proposed a PPI Expert Co-I who will lead a PPI working group and community-focused PPI activity to give overall support to the Team as well as each of the n=10 evaluations. There will also be dedicated PPI Outputs from the activities of this group, which will form part of the Knowledge Mobilisation plan. We are committed to maximising impact from our research findings. We have described how this will be facilitated through a Knowledge Mobilisation plan for each evaluation that supports uptake, use and impact of the findings. We will employ a Knowledge Broker (dedicated dissemination expert) for the duration of the work to lead on these activities.
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