Pathways to research excellence: developing a Health Determinants Research Collaboration for sustainable and applied research in Doncaster

Background: Doncaster Council is well placed to host and deliver a HDRC. Our Borough Strategy Doncaster Delivering Together (DDT) is about Thriving People, Places & Planet. It emphasises the need to improve wellbeing, and to do this we need intelligence led interventions. We know being research active as a Place and organisation is better for the people we serve, the people we employ and contributes to our knowledge economies. There is also a need within our borough, due to its industrial past and high levels of deprivation (United Kingdom Health Security Agency, 2019). Doncaster is the largest metropolitan borough by area in England with a dispersed populationThis presents a significant challenge in connecting people, places and businesses to economic and social opportunities. Our learning from the Local Authority Research Systems (LARS) funding identified that we had pockets of high quality research (including grant capture), but that we needed investment to build our capability and capacity to undertake sustained applied research and development. We have promising roots and a strong collaboration with Sheffield Hallam University (SHU) and The University of Sheffield (TUoS). Establishing a HDRC in Doncaster will nurture these roots and allow us to deliver for the people of Doncaster. Vision: We will focus on further growing our capacity to develop and use knowledge within our decision-making processes leading to better outcomes for our citizens AIm: Build pathways to research excellence that deliver a sustainable and applied research culture in Doncaster. Our objectives are two-fold and interconnected: To ensure enhanced use of research evidence to inform decision-making aimed at improving health and tackling inequalities across all functions and departments (WS1); To build capability, capacity and motivation to undertake research and development to address the wider determinants of health across our HDRC (WS2). Methods: we will use embedded researchers to support the delivery of two workstreams. Within WS1 we will develop skills in our people and in our organisation to bring together research evidence combined with what we know locally. We will identify how best to deliver this information so that it can be part of a decision-making conversation. In WS2 we will develop skills in our people and processes necessary to do research which will help us to understand the factors that influence our health and wellbeing. We will ensure that Equity is at the heart of capacity building working by ensuring that we do not privilege some voices/ ideas above others Impact and dissemination: our HDRC will have internal and external impact. Internally, building cohorts of motivated decision-makers who are ‘savvy in the craft of evidence use’ will, in and of itself, ensure we routinely make enhanced use of research evidence to inform local decision making. It will build skills to mobilise knowledge on what works for whom and in what circumstances to support commissioning and policy decisions and therefore improve outcomes for the citizens of Doncaster. Externally, our HDRC will contribute to knowledge on how to synthesise and mobilise evidence within local government.Our learning from our investment in public involvement, underpinned by our ambition to address epistemic inequity will have wider benefits within research practice and public engagement and we intend to share this via appropriate networks