2017

Investment will not necessarily lead to better use of research in health

Increased funding for health service and policy research will not necessarily lead to better use of research by health system decision-makers, argues Fuse Senior Investigator Professor David Hunter.

In comment piece "Making Research Matter" for the International Journal of Health Policy and Management (IJHPM), Professors Hunter and John Frank, Director of the Scottish Collaboration for Public Health Research & Policy (SCPHRP), respond to an article on the subject of Health Systems Reform titled: “Public Spending on Health Service and Policy Research in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States: A Modest Proposal”.

In the abstract the pair say:

We offer a UK-based commentary on the recent “Perspective” published in IJHPM by Thakkar and Sullivan. We are sympathetic to the authors’ call for increased funding for health service and policy research (HSPR). However, we point out that increasing that investment – in any of the three countries they compare: Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom– will ipso facto not necessarily lead to any better use of research by health system decision-makers in these settings. We cite previous authors’ descriptions of the many factors that tend to make the worlds of researchers and decision-makers into “two solitudes.” And we call for changes in the structure and funding of HSPR, particularly the incentives now in place for purely academic publishing, to tackle a widespread reality: most published research in HSPR, as in other applied fields of science, is never read or used by the vast majority of decision-makers, working out in the “real world.” Keywords: Health Service and Policy Research (HSPR), Evidence, Health Reform

To read the full article please click on the link below.

Making Research Matter

Last modified: Thu, 25 Mar 2021 11:00:01 GMT