Local governments across the UK will get faster, more rigorous evaluations of their public health initiatives through a new research team that embeds academics, practitioners, and community members directly into the decision-making process. Public health interventions—from stop-smoking programmes to healthy food schemes—are often designed and delivered by local authorities, but rigorous evaluation of their real-world effectiveness is patchy and slow. This project fills the gap between academic research and local government practice by creating a flexible, rapid-response team that can assess these programmes while they are still running, rather than years later. If successful, the model could transform how local authorities spend public health budgets. Instead of relying on anecdote or outdated evidence, councils would have timely, place-based data showing what actually works in their communities. The team’s emphasis on public involvement—including a dedicated Public Advisory Board and local community representatives—ensures that evaluations reflect the needs of the people the programmes are meant to serve. The ultimate change would be more effective, evidence-based public health policy delivered faster and more equitably across the UK.
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AIM: ‘PHIRST REACH’ (Responsive Evaluation and Analytics for Community Health) will work collaboratively to deliver high quality, timely, place-based evaluations to inform evidence-based decision making and contribute to improvement in public health policies/services. We are a multifaceted team of expertise from academic institutes (Universities of York, Leeds and Bradford Institute of Health Research), policy experts, public health practitioners, and community representatives that have a successful history of working in partnership with local governments in evaluation research. APPROACH: Building upon the lessons learnt from previous PHIRST teams, we will work flexibly to deliver high quality research at pace. Upon project allocation, we will quickly assemble an Evaluability Task and Finish team (ETF), including a nominated project lead, core researchers, a local authority representative and a public representative. Once evaluability has been established, an Evaluation Delivery Team (EDT; ETF, in addition to a seconded local authority representative and local community representatives) will be responsible for developing a protocol and delivering research and outputs. ETF and EDT will report to the PHIRST-REACH senior management team (SMT) which has overall responsibility across projects, with oversight from two Advisory groups (Expert and Public Partnership). PUBLIC INVOLVEMENT AND ENGAGEMENT (PIE): Our approach to involving and engaging local communities will use established principles that we have co-developed to ensure a diverse range of voices are heard; based on three underlying values of equality, reciprocity and agency. PIE will include meaningful involvement in all aspects of the research, from evaluability to dissemination. We have planned for a PHIRST-REACH Public Advisory Board (2 meetings/year) to provide oversight to our evaluation plans and delivery as a whole, and how we work with community members in each locality. Our existing well established PIE groups will support PIE groups (new and existing) based within each evaluation area to enable knowledge sharing, training and partnership working. We include a dedicated and experienced PIE lead and public co-applicant to support all activities. ANTICIPATED IMPACT AND DISSEMINATION We include plans to deliver a range of co-designed outputs, to meet the needs of diverse audiences. We are experienced in developing reports for decision making and will include briefings and infographics, as well as outputs for the public, public health practitioners and voluntary and healthcare organisations based on our knowledge mobilisation strategy. This will be developed and delivered with support from our Public Partnership Advisory Group, local community representatives, and our Advisory Board (including an OHID Knowledge Exchange expert). A variety of audience specific, accessible formats will be produced, including a public-facing website, social media, dissemination events/conferences and webinars. Our success will be assessed by our Advisory groups and the funders via our ability to work to time and target, our inclusivity in collaboration and PIE, and whether we are able to reach diverse audiences with dissemination. Our experience tells us that risks largely relate to delays in contracting, approvals and data acquisition (mitigated via leveraging existing collaborations, careful planning, building strong relationships and ensuring transparency in communication).
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