A team of researchers will produce evidence syntheses—systematic reviews that summarise what is known about a health or social care question—by embedding patients, the public, and policymakers directly into the review process as co-producers, not just as passive subjects. This matters because evidence syntheses often fail to inform real-world decisions. They are produced without genuine input from the people who will use or be affected by the findings, rely on outdated evidence, and are presented in ways that are irrelevant to decision-making contexts. The group will overcome these failures through four practices: engaging stakeholders to ensure relevance; co-producing reviews with diverse communities to ensure equity and inclusivity; using evidence-to-decision methods—such as logic models, novel statistical techniques, and mixed methods—to maximise utility and impact; and deploying semi-automated continuous surveillance to keep reviews up to date. If this succeeds, the approach could transform how health and social care decisions are made across the UK. Reviews will reflect what stakeholders actually need, include marginalised voices, and remain current through automated alerts. The team will also produce interactive summary tables and, when needed, model-based economic evaluations. The result is more useful, timely, and equitable evidence for policymakers, practitioners, and the public.
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Evidence synthesis provides decisionmakers with timely, reliable information and increases opportunities for the efficient use of resources. However, evidence syntheses cannot inform decisions when they are produced: with poor knowledge of stakeholders; in ways that marginalise the voices of beneficiaries; with little salience to decision-making contexts; and based on outdated evidence. Our Evidence Synthesis Group (ESG) will overcome these challenges by embedding the following practices into all evidence syntheses we produce: • (i) Engagement with stakeholders to ensure relevance: We will draw on our networks of contacts, including through the Co-Production Collective as well as across UCL and beyond, to ensure that our reviews reflect relevant health and social care stakeholder perspectives from across the UK on the types of policy options, recommendations, and evolving NIHR priorities that are going to be under consideration. Engagement in the overarching ESG advisory group and in individual review projects will help identify what really matters to stakeholders. • (ii) Co-production to ensure equity and inclusivity: Co-Production Collective will ensure the ESG delivers evidence syntheses that are meaningfully co-produced in a diverse and inclusive research environment, founded on close, equitable, reciprocal, diverse and inclusive partnerships with communities and groups from across the UK. Through an ESG-wide advisory group, we will ensure the democratisation of knowledge produced by the ESG and enhance the quality of the research and its impact. Further, patients, the public, and policymakers will be included as review team members through an extensive programme of co-production workshop groups linked to each review with whom we will iteratively develop the work. • (iii) Evidence-to-decision methods to ensure utility and impact: We will employ appropriate methods, for example, conceptualising complexity and context using logic models to support each review, implementing novel statistical methods for handling context within a meta-analytic dataset as well as the incorporating additional observational data to contextualise meta-analysis, and employing mixed methods to explore complex relationships within interventions and between interventions and their context. Using creative and interactive formats, such as interactive summary of findings tables that enable users to explore review- and study-level data, we will ensure accessibility of our findings across audiences. We have also put in place arrangements to produce model-based economic evaluations if required. • (iv) Automation and continuous surveillance to ensure up-to-date evidence: Automation and semi-automated workflows will ensure that efficient systems are in place for identifying, and keeping abreast of, relevant and new evidence. Our novel, semi-automated, continuous evidence surveillance system, hosted in our EPPI-Reviewer software, will allow us to provide signals and alerts for updating our ESG’s reviews, or conduct living reviews. Time and cost efficiencies offered by automation will also support relevant and useful outputs by maximising time for undertaking nuanced syntheses and methodologically innovative studies (including studies within reviews). The research will be carried out by an experienced team with a track record of delivering large programmes of methodologically innovative synthesis for informing policy and practice.
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