Recipient organisationNuffield Department of Primary Care Health Sciences
Funding£1.9M
PeriodOct 2017 — Mar 2021
In plain English
AI plain-English summary
A team of UK researchers is producing 20 systematic reviews to help the NHS decide what works in primary care, from urgent care to end-of-life treatment. This matters because general practice is under severe strain: an ageing population, a shift of care from hospitals to the community, and pressure to adopt new technologies while staying within budget. The NHS needs reliable evidence on which treatments, services, and models of care actually deliver better outcomes—and for whom. Too many decisions are made without that evidence. The reviews will cover four priority areas: urgent care interfaces, end-of-life care and bereavement, new drugs and technologies for chronic disease (using unpublished data), and health service redesign in primary care. The team will use advanced methods—including realist and complex reviews—to go beyond simple questions of “does it work?” and ask “in what situations, and for whom?”. If successful, the reviews will directly inform NHS policy, clinical guidelines, and practical interventions. The findings could reshape how GP practices organise care, how patients access urgent help, and how end-of-life support is delivered. The work also identifies gaps in current knowledge, guiding future research priorities.
View original technical description
Primary care is increasingly under considerable pressure to meet the demands of an ageing population and to transform care with more done in the community, against a backdrop of ensuring new technologies are used whilst maintaining budgets. To address these issues we have formed a cross-school collaboration to address important questions with the aim of delivering a significant number of high impact systematic reviews to underpin effective care in important priority areas for the NHS. We are planning to deliver an ambitious program of 20 high quality evidence synthesis reviews under four different workstreams: the urgent care interface; end of life care and bereavement; assessment of new drugs and technologies in chronic disease patients using unpublished data sources; and health service redesign in primary care. This program of work has been developed by all members of the school with the right mix of expertise alongside a coherent work plan to deliver significant outputs. Our project protocol outlines the methods for the major review types by review type. Across these reviews we will use standard up-to-date systematic review methods and search strategies that we are both familiar with and have extensive expertise in. For each review we will produce a pre-specified protocol and lay summaries for posting on the NIHR SPCR site. We will prospectively register each of the systematic review protocols on PROSPERO. Our aim is to produce high quality reviews that not only test what works, but also determine through the use of novel evidence synthesis methods (such as realist reviews and complex reviews) what works, in what situations, for whom; and identify clinical and methodology gaps that can inform future research, inform policy and develop robust practical interventions for primary care.
NIHR School for Primary Care Research - Primary Care
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