A team of academics at London South Bank University will carry out rapid evaluations of ten local public health interventions, working directly with council teams to answer their most pressing questions. This matters because local authorities often implement health programmes—such as schemes to reduce smoking, gambling harm, or poor mental health—without the time or resources to rigorously test whether they work. The gap between what councils need to know and what the research literature provides is wide, and decisions are frequently made on limited evidence. If this project succeeds, it will give local decision-makers concrete, timely answers about which interventions actually reduce health inequalities in their communities. The findings will feed directly back into how councils design and fund services, potentially shifting resources toward approaches that have been shown to work. The team also builds research capacity by training local staff and embedding public contributors—people with lived experience—as peer researchers, so the learning outlasts any single evaluation.
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PHIRST South Bank, established in 2020, forms part of NIHR’s ambition to build capacity in public health (PH) research. This evaluation centre provides a specialist academic resource to work with local PH teams to provide research answers to questions facing local decision makers in addressing the PH priorities and inequalities within their communities while also filling gaps in the wider PH evidence base. Specifically, we will undertake rapid and robust evaluations of ten interventions allocated by NIHR. With an understanding of PH as multi-disciplinary with ‘upstream’ determinants relevant across local government, PHIRST South Bank is a team of experienced academics from three LSBU Research Centres (Health and Well-being, Building Future Communities and the Built Environment). With academics specialising in: health promotion, behavioural science, mental health, smoking and vaping, gambling, sport science, planning and the built environment and health economics, we can respond to traditional and non-traditional PH interventions. With an infrastructure consisting of an External Advisory group, an internal Centre Executive Committee, a dedicated PHIRST team and a research team for each evaluation, we have established systems to ensure we respond at pace while complying to rigorous research standards. We are committed to co-production with our partners. We use workshopping with stakeholders to identify a shared understanding of the: aims and processes of the intervention; logic model and theory of change underpinning the intervention; existing evidence and gaps in knowledge; evaluation question that is feasible and useful to both the local intervention and the wider PH community; appropriate evaluation design plan.?We work closely with stakeholders to ensure engagement in the process and that learning is continually fed back. We will identify a local “research champion” with whom we will have an enhanced working relationship. Through these processes and relationships, we will build an understanding of research and support the development of research capacity with local partners. We use quantitative and qualitative methodologies and draw on existing local data where available. Given the PHIRST timelines, our evaluations are typically process evaluations or summative evaluations that explore short term rather than long term outcomes. Public Involvement is central to our approach. Our evaluations benefit from views, knowledge and lived experience of public contributors (PCs). We thread Public Involvement through our infrastructure with two PCs sitting on our external Advisory Group, two PCs sitting on our internal Centre Executive Committee and a local Public Panel to support each evaluation. Where possible we give PCs enhanced roles as peer researchers. We plan for mobilisation of knowledge from the outset, identifying ongoing opportunities to share learning with stakeholders. Our dissemination, impact, innovation, communication and engagement strategy ensures we plan effective communication for different groups at different stages of the decision-making cycle at local, national and, where appropriate, international levels. We work with local stakeholders and public contributors to produce effective forms of communication for different groups at different stages of the decision-making cycle including a range of creative outputs such as; slide deck reports, research briefings, animations, infographics and academic publications.
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