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1. Background
The research strategy of the Health Sciences Research Institute (HSRI) has been, and continues to be, developed by the Institute’s senior academics who come from a range of professional and academic disciplinary backgrounds including general practice, public health epidemiology, social science, community nursing, psychiatry, emergency care, rehabilitation and social care. With the appointment of the new Chair and two senior lecturers in child health, the strategy will undergo further development.
The current strategy reflects that developed by the Centre for Primary Health Care Studies in 2000 which argued for an integrated, multi-disciplinary research group to consolidate research in progress, increase the critical mass of research staff and gain economies of scale. It has been developed with the aim of submitting to Main Panel B in the forthcoming Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) which has units of assessment in:
- Epidemiology & Public Health
- Health Services Research
- Primary Care & other Community Based Clinical Subjects
- Psychiatry Neuroscience & Clinical Psychology.
1.1 The interdisciplinary nature of HSRI research
The hallmark of the Institute’s research is that it is interdisciplinary with strong links to research on diabetes and cardiovascular disease in the WMS Institute of Clinical Sciences and the Department of Biology, and to research on quality of health care provision and on inequalities in health in the Department of Health and Social Care. Collectively, members of the HSRI have agreed on six main overarching priorities for their research covering three disease specific topics (cardiovascular disease and diabetes, mental health, and emergency care and rehabilitation) and three cross cutting themes (patient experience, emotional and social development, and modernisation of primary care and social care and their interfaces). The interdisciplinary nature of the HSRI’s research makes for difficulties in presenting the strategy in traditional medical specialty, research groups and/or RAE sub-panel areas as we have endeavoured to do below. However, the cross disciplinary components of the strategy clearly emerge within and between the research described for each group.
1.2 Common interests & needs
Members of the Institute share a common interest in methodological developments. All groups are currently evaluating complex interventions of one sort or another enabling the Institute to contribute to this important new area of research. There is also great commonality of need within the Institute, which ensures that we are able to agree on priorities and resource allocation. The research governance and administration function in the Institute is a good example of a collective resource that works extremely well. Likewise the imminent appointment of senior academics in statistics and health economics will benefit all research groups in the Institute as well as those in other parts of the medical school and wider university.
1.3 Funding Opportunities
Funding opportunities are presented by calls for research from the UK Health Technology Assessment Programme, the national Service Delivery & Organisation Programme, the New & Emerging Technologies Programme, the Department of Health’s Health & Social Care programme, the Department for Education & Skills Children’s Health and Well-being Programme and the ESRC. Charitable bodies such as the Wellcome Trust, British Heart Foundation, Diabetes UK, the World Cancer Research Fund, the BUPA Foundation and the Nuffield Foundation fund programmes of research in this group’s field of activity. The recent announcement by the UK Government of significant additional funding for mental health and cardiovascular disease research is a potential source of further funding.
