Ten local authorities across the UK will each get a bespoke, rigorously evaluated public health intervention over the next five years, with researchers embedded directly in council teams to ensure the findings are actually used. This matters because local councils routinely roll out programmes to improve health—such as schemes to reduce childhood obesity, improve air quality, or support mental wellbeing—but often lack the resources or expertise to measure whether they actually work, for whom, and at what cost. Without that evidence, money can be wasted on ineffective initiatives, and health inequalities can widen. The PHIRST Fusion team fills that gap by providing free, rapid, and rigorous evaluations co-designed with the councils themselves. If successful, each evaluation will produce actionable recommendations that councils can immediately implement. The team will also publish shared learning across all ten projects, so other local authorities across the UK can benefit from the same evidence without commissioning their own studies. Over time, this could shift how public health decisions are made—from hunches and precedent to data and demonstrated impact.
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This PHIRST team builds on and extends the work of PHIRST Fusion, one of the original PHIRST teams established in 2020. We aim to continue to provide evidence to support local and national decision-making to improve health and reduce health inequalities across our communities by delivering 10 local authority (LA) evaluations over the next 5 years. Our team brings together many years of experience in applied translational research in public health across all four UK nations. In addition to our work in PHIRST Fusion, team members have leading roles in UKCRC funded Centres of Excellence in Public Health (Fuse in North East England; the Centre of Excellence for Public Health in Northern Ireland; the Scottish Collaboration for Public Health Research and Policy), the MRC/CSO Social & Public Health Sciences Unit, and the NIHR School for Public Health Research (SPHR). We have expertise in in the evaluation of complex interventions and natural experimental methods, rapid response-mode research, intervention development and adaptation, realist evaluation, systems thinking and systems evaluation in public health, and applied economic evaluation in a policy context. Following successful implementation during the original PHIRST Fusion, we will continue to use a five-step approach to evaluation: 1. Brokerage: refining research questions, delivery and timescales to create a research brief to match expertise and skills and identify opportunities for co-production, applying the SPHR’s six knowledge sharing principles. 2. Evaluability assessment: a series of workshops with local policymakers, practitioners, public/community members to co-design an evaluation and knowledge mobilisation plan that addresses the LA partners' evidence needs. 3. Research: the evaluation plan and knowledge mobilisation plan are put into action, led by a PHIRST co-investigator and with a LA practitioner embedded within the research team. Peer researchers will be recruited and trained to join the local project team wherever possible. 4. Reporting and knowledge mobilisation: findings and recommendations for implementation are presented to the LA and mobilised to key stakeholders. 5. Continuous improvement: post-evaluation reviews are conducted to identify and share learning and demonstrate impact. Each evaluation is expected to last between 9–24 months depending on the stage of intervention development. Timelines and the scale of each evaluation will be determined during the brokerage stage. Members of the public will be involved throughout each evaluation, following the SPHR Public Involvement and Engagement Strategy. Where possible, we will build on existing initiatives within the LAs we work with to support public involvement in evaluation design, implementation and knowledge mobilisation. Where this does not exist, we will use existing networks of PHIRST team members to identify public members to contribute to the evaluation. Our knowledge mobilisation plan will ensure we maximise the impact of the evidence produced by each evaluation. This will include co-producing a range of accessible outputs from each project to meet the needs of different audiences, including policymakers, practitioners and members of the public. These will be disseminated through our networks and made available on the PHIRST website for other LAs and partners. We will also publish academic articles documenting the evaluation methods and shared learning across projects.
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