We are delighted to announce the details of:
The 3rd Fuse International Conference on Knowledge Exchange in Public Health 27-28th April 2016, Hilton Hotel, Gateshead, UK Conference Theme: “Evidence to Impact in Public Health
To build on the success of the previous two Fuse knowledge exchange in public health conferences: Durham, UK in 2011 and Noordwijkerhout, the Netherlands in 2013.
In the UK: the rising incidence of public ill-health, fast changing contexts and an age of austerity have required public health practitioners to increasingly make a business case for public health spend. In parallel, the Research Excellence Framework 2014, required academics to produce case studies to demonstrate the impact of their research on policy and practice to improve the life of citizens. Similar pressures are in evidence in many countries around the world.
While both issues (public health practitioners looking for useful evidence and academics looking for new ways to measure impact) have been explored and discussed, they have not yet been explored in combination. How does the need for interdisciplinary evidence among local public health departments relate to academics searching for impact of their research? Does this challenge us to think differently about the role of research and the research process in public health? Could new measures for impact be developed in co-production between academics and health practitioners that would inform a new evidence base for cross-disciplinary working in public health localities and beyond?
Therefore, this conference will bring together academics, public health professionals and decision makers, and Local Authority staff with an interest in exploring the link between measuring impact and what counts as evidence for different disciplines related to public health. Participants are invited to share their practical experiences of drawing upon a range of evidence sources to demonstrate the wider value of their interventions and programmes to non-health professionals and commissioners. We are keen to hear from academics building conceptual and methodological bridges between public health and related disciplines, such as sociology and arts & media, to inform new ways of measuring impact. We are particularly interested in new collaborative models and approaches for working in co-production to measure the impact of research on public health decision making and examples of how new ways of working across policy areas shape the academic research agenda.