Abstract
Health services research (HSR) has had a significant impact on society in terms of influencing health and social care policy, practice, and the health and well-being of citizens. Rarely, however, is this impact documented in a way which demonstrates clearly to funders and policy makers its value. An opportunity to showcase the benefits of HSR carried out by UK universities was recently provided by the Research Excellence Framework (REF) exercise which has provided a wealth of detailed evidence about the nature of this research and its impact.
Every five to six years, the UK government conducts a national exercise to assess the quality of research conducted in its Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), based primarily on expert peer review. In 2013, a revised approach was used – the REF. In addition to assessing the quality of research outputs and the research environment provided by universities, the assessment included expert review of case studies submitted by HEIs. The case studies outlined changes and benefits (beyond academia) to the economy, society, culture, public policy and services, health, the environment and quality of life in the UK and internationally during the assessment period, arising from high-quality research conducted since 1993. REF impact case studies were written by HEIs, following a four-page template provided for REF submissions. For further information on REF criteria, please see: http://www.ref.ac.uk/pubs/2011-02/.
The Journal intends to showcase some of the best examples of impact by publishing summaries of a selection of impact case studies produced for the REF, organized around key themes. The full text of each case study is available on http://impact.ref.ac.uk/CaseStudies/. Reading the case studies has been both educational and fascinating – and clearly demonstrates that our research really does make a difference.
Given the breadth and depth of the impact, and the large number submissions, the selection of a small number of case studies to include in this series, has been a challenge. We found interesting examples of HSR in five REF Units of Assessment (UoA 2 – Public Health, Health Services and Primary Care; UoA 3 – Allied Health Professions, Dentistry, Nursing and Pharmacy; UoA 18 – Economics and Econometrics; UoA 19 – Business and Management Studies; and UoA 22 – Social Work and Social Policy). We selected case studies illustrating the strength, substantive and methodological range, and impact of research across a diverse set of topics. We used as a general guide the overall REF ratings assigned to institutions for impact which, although not allowing us to draw conclusions about the rating of individual case studies, did mean that overall the case studies were likely to have been highly rated. We looked for studies that had a HSR focus (as opposed to public health, for example), and were interesting and relevant to the broad themes we developed. We sought permission from lead authors to edit their case studies and we provided an opportunity for them to comment on our summaries.
We do not claim that the final set that the Journal will publish are all the ‘best’ impact studies, but they are representative of the diverse types of impacts that HSR is capable of having. The fact that so many interesting case studies had to be omitted again testifies to the strength of UK HSR.