About the Health Determinants Research Collaboration

In late 2022 the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) awarded Plymouth City Council and its partners £4.7 million of investment over five years to tackle the determinants of health inequalities. These include non-medical factors that impact peoples’ health and can explain differences in health outcomes between groups such as education, employment, housing, and community safety and well-being to name but a few.

The Plymouth Health Determinants Research Collaboration (PHDRC) is one of 10 pioneering HDRCs awarded funding to embed a culture of evidence-based decision-making within local government. This will help commissioners understand how research can influence and inform their decision making and also provide the opportunities and capacity for teams and individuals to ask the questions and take a leading role in research and evaluation.

The new partnerships, spanning the length and breadth of the UK, follow a major drive for enabling research to address wider determinants of population health and health inequalities, explicitly responding to the needs of local underserved groups and areas, especially where new service models or new thinking is needed.

The programme has a twofold ambition, to offer options for high quality research, and also a drive to support council commissioners and teams to undertake and use research and evidence to inform decision making and the spending of council funds, in ways which lead to better take up and improved quality of life.

The lead organisation is the Public Health Department of Plymouth City Council, working closely in partnership and benefitting from the skills of University of Plymouth researchers and academics as well as colleagues at Plymouth Octopus, the wider voluntary and community sector, the NHS, business, and other academic groups.

What the programme looks to achieve

Aims:

develop the culture and skills to ensure a learning approach informs decision making
produce knowledge for use locally and of value nationally, especially for similar coastal communities

Objectives:

support changes aimed at addressing the wider determinants of health through a cultural change in relation to the use of evidence and evaluation
carry out specific prioritised research projects related to The Plymouth Plan’s innovations to address the wider determinants of health
successfully bid for external research funding
build collaborations for sharing knowledge and carrying out research with other HDRCs and similar coastal communities

How it will work

We have set up a joint Plymouth City Council and University of Plymouth (UoP) research team embedded within the Council. The team will work alongside those delivering changes designed to address the wider determinants of health and collaborate with specialist university researchers. Public partnership will be developed though links to existing organisations and the engagement of individuals during specific projects.

The project is funding research which supports the delivery of the Plymouth Plan and help us understand better the way in which services need to be delivered to have a real and lasting impact on the wider determinants of health. Research will be funded by offering the skills and capacity from experts to work alongside council teams, with funding for the backfill of posts for team members.

Initial work will focus on culture change and wider skills development. We will focus on helping people understand the shift from commissioning based on monitoring delivery to decision making based on understanding complex interactions. Specific research projects likely to have the most impact locally and nationally will be developed.

Informed by a Human Learning Systems philosophy and building on the existing use of Appreciative Inquiry (AI), the team will use a range of methods suited to understanding complex dynamic systems: evidence synthesis, quantitative analysis of routine data, realist informed observation and interviews and health economics.

A variety of training opportunities will also be made available to support individual members of staff to better understand and engage with research and evaluation.