Title: Public Health Intervention Responsive Studies Team: PHIRST South Bank
Funder: Department of Health and Social Care

Abstract: London South Bank University (LSBU) has a great deal of experience, in researching and evaluating public health priorities, jointly with Local Authorities (LAs). These priorities include: mental health, an ageing population, obesity, climate change, the impact of the built environment, safer transport and substance misuse. LSBU’s research has often focussed on inequalities and vulnerable populations._x000D_ Our PHIRST (Public Health Intervention Responsive Studies Team) Centre brings together academics from five of the LSBU's research centres: The Centres for Applied Research in Improvement and Innovation; for Addictive Behaviours; for Sports and Exercise Science; for Civil and Building Services Engineering Research; and The Centre for Global Justice and Social Responsibility. This large team of experts will bring a diversity of knowledge, research skills, and capacity to evaluate both traditional and non-traditional public-health projects._x000D_ A Centre Executive Committee (CEC) will manage the Centre. Its permanent membership will include: the Principle Investigator, a co-investigator from each of our research centres and a co-investigator from LSBU’s People’s Academy. An Advisory Committee will oversee the Centre and will include senior representatives of the Public Health Community and an advisor from each of the four UK nations. The four nation advisors will inform the CEC using their experience and knowledge of how public health projects are delivered in their nation, as this varies across the UK._x000D_ The Centre will ensure public involvement in its work throughout the planning, delivery and results sharing of each evaluation. LSBU has a People’s Academy made up of members of the public. A member of the People’s Academy will be a co-investigator and CEC member. This is to champion the public’s views, and hold the CEC accountable to them. LSBU will also work with each LA to ensure community members can contribute directly and accessibly to the local evaluation._x000D_ LSBU will work closely with each LA in planning and undertaking the evaluations. Each project will begin with a two day “sandpit” planning event for our research team and Local Authority staff. This is in order to share ideas, agree the priorities for the evaluation and begin to plan how it should be undertaken. We will also agree the best way to work together throughout the project, how LA staff can help undertake the evaluation and whether any training needs to be provided._x000D_ Each evaluation will ask “How is the public health project affecting the health of the population?”, “Who is benefiting most?” and “How can the project be made more successful?”. We will approach each evaluation differently according to what will work best. We will use numerical techniques to measure the project’s success and narrative/interview techniques, allowing us to find out about people’s experience of the project. Our research team has skills in a wide range of research techniques but if an evaluation needs any specialist skills that we don’t have at LSBU, we have research contacts at different organisations that we will ask to help us._x000D_ Communicating opportunities for involvement, reporting progress, and sharing our findings are important to us. We want to enable others to learn about what does and doesn’t work in public health. We will have a plan for sharing the findings from each evaluation with others in LAs, public health and academia, public health policy makers and the public. We will do this by writing articles and speaking at events, and also by creating podcasts, leaflets, animations and a website, to make the information accessible.

Lay abstract: The London South Bank University PHIRST Centre will provide LAs and the NIHR with direct access to a large, established, multi-disciplinary team with a background across the broad range of Public Health priorities currently facing LAs including mental health, an ageing population, obesity, climate change, substance misuse as well as the challenges of establishing place-based population health systems and working with complex and vulnerable groups. Drawing on this experience and expertise we propose a systematic project delivery model which places LAs, service users and other stakeholders at the centre of the project design and creation process, in particular featuring a ‘sandpit’ approach to ensure that a relevant, practically deliverable, and logic modelled research plan is developed rapidly. Once a plan is agreed with the LA and NIHR, we will simultaneously build local research capacity, manage ethics oversight and other pre-implementation activities before proceeding to the main implementation stage. Drawing upon stakeholders as required, and in close consultation with the relevant LAs, the project will be delivered in line with the initial plan, supported by a set of decision-making principles to be employed at key milestones in response to ‘known unknowns’, and collaboratively responding to ‘unknown unknowns’. Finally, each project will draw upon our strengths in innovative co-produced dissemination to ensure that the findings of the research project reach all stakeholders in ways which ensure engagement - with tailored strategies aimed at organisational, community and national level organisations and groups. The Centre will also benefit from a governance structure involving a Director supported by a Deputy, a Centre Executive Committee, including members of the LSBU People's Academy. Oversight will be provided by an Advisory Committee with representatives from each of the four nations and from across the public health community. Each evaluation project will comprise a bespoke mix of academics supported by a dedicated research fellow and research assistant and supported by a PPI Advisory Group and a Stakeholder Reference Group. Ethics governance will be provided by LSBU’s University Ethics Panel, working in close collaboration with other stakeholders’ research and ethics oversight teams._x000D_ To achieve timely and robust delivery, the PHIRST Centre draws upon a genuinely multidisciplinary team of academics from across LSBU - with representatives from five of our University Research Centres (The Centres for Applied Research in Improvement and Innovation; for Addictive Behaviours; for Sports and Exercise Science; for Civil and Building Services Engineering Research; and The Centre for Global Justice and Social Responsibility. It also draws on a wide variety of external academic associates and stakeholder networks linked with the research team. _x000D_ This team demonstrates a strong ability to deliver to tight timescales, based on our experience in partnering with startup health tech SMEs, fast turnaround projects for LAs and responses to unforeseen events such as the COVID19 pandemic. Diverse dissemination is evidenced by activities ranging from traditional academic and stakeholder text-based outputs, to award winning novel methods such as animations and art exhibitions – all of which engage the right stakeholders in the right ways._x000D_ In summary, this proposal outlines how an existing multidisciplinary group of academics, already working in collaboration alongside a wide network of organisations, can be leveraged to provide timely, stakeholder driven solutions to the issues LAs face.

Research activity codes: 8.4 RESEARCH DESIGN AND METHODOLOGIES (HEALTH SERVICES)
Health categories: GENERIC HEALTH RELEVANCE