Local authorities across the UK will get faster, more useful answers about whether their public health programmes actually work, thanks to a new collaboration between the University of Exeter and the McPin Foundation. Public health teams in local government often need to know quickly whether a new programme—such as a school-based mental health initiative or a housing support service—is reducing health inequalities. But traditional academic evaluations can take years, leaving decision-makers to act on guesswork. This project fills that gap by creating a rapid-response evaluation service that embeds researchers directly inside local authorities and pairs them with community researchers who have lived experience of the issues being studied. If successful, the team will deliver actionable evidence within months, not years, allowing councils to scale up effective programmes and drop ineffective ones sooner. The approach is designed to reach communities that experience the greatest health inequalities, including people in prisons, care homes, and deprived neighbourhoods. Over the five-year programme, the researchers will build a Community and Public Steering Group to ensure evaluations stay relevant to local needs. The result could be more efficient public spending and better-targeted services that quietly improve everyday life for the most disadvantaged populations across England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland.
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BACKGROUND. The Exeter-McPin PHIRST (EMPower-PHIRST) is a distinctive collaboration spanning the higher education and third sectors, including complementary expertise from the University of Exeter and McPin Foundation. The University of Exeter is a leading academic centre in public health, community involvement and engagement (particularly those experiencing the greatest inequalities), evidence synthesis and health services research to inform policy and practice. McPin Foundation is a leading charity with expertise in mental wellbeing, peer research and research involvement and engagement, and is an anchor partner for the NIHR School for Public Health Research. The applicants all have significant expertise in working flexibly and responsively with public sector partners to deliver timely evaluation evidence, underpinned by community engagement and co-design, and partnerships with local government, communities and the voluntary sector. We have wide-ranging methodological expertise in evaluability assessments, feasibility trials, realist evaluations, evidence synthesis, and statistical methods, with distinctive expertise in peer and community research and involvement and engagement. We work across diverse settings such as schools, care homes, neighbourhoods, and prisons and have topic expertise in all major public health areas. We have supportive working relationships with local governments and bodies delivering public health services across the four nations of the UK, and our inclusion of an embedded researcher and community researcher approach means that we will be able to co-develop and deliver evaluations in a timely, responsive manner. AIMS AND OBJECTIVES. To support local authorities with timely, responsive evaluation evidence, informed by robust community involvement and engagement, in support of the delivery of effective services to impact health inequalities. METHODS. Informed by our learning through engagement approach, we will use tailored methods in each evaluation. Starting with an evaluability assessment and/or feasibility study, we will then design an evaluation plan that draws on our wide-ranging expertise while foregrounding local expertise. The inclusion of community partners will ensure that evaluations address the wider determinants of health and inequalities, as well as the specifics of local communities. In parallel, our inclusion of both embedded local authority researchers and community research partners will build capacity and ensure a high degree of relevance of commissioned evaluations. In addition to project-specific involvement and engagement arrangements, we will develop programme-level involvement and engagement as well, including a Community and Public Steering Group. We will build this group with our developing networks from evaluations as these progress over the five years of the programme. IMPACT AND DISSEMINATION. We recognise the importance of active dissemination of the findings at local, regional and national level in ways that are appropriate to different audiences, including policy and practice, community and academic stakeholders. In our work, we routinely engage multiple public, professional, and policy stakeholders throughout the research lifecycle so that research addresses the knowledge needs of stakeholders and is presented in a form that is actionable. Our approach is informed by the School for Public Health Research knowledge sharing principles and will be supported by local consultation.
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