When was nihr founded

We are funded by the Department of Health and Social Care. Our work focuses on early translational research, clinical research and applied health and social care research. We are centred on England but collaborate closely with the devolved administrations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

We are also a major funder of applied health research in low and middle income countries, work that is principally funded through UK aid from the UK government. News: Arm and shoulder disability and pain after breast cancer surgery reduced by exercise. And with Google Docs , Google Sheets , and Google Slides , several people can collaborate on the same documents in real time, then store and share those documents quickly and easily using Google Drive.

On top of making communication and collaboration easier for NIHR staff, Google Workspace has also helped to ease the administrative task of managing so many people across so many different areas while still maintaining the highest standards of security.

Instead, we have an easy way to securely handle on- and offboarding. Together with PA, it runs a survey every year asking for feedback on what features work best for users and what can be improved. In , this survey opened the way to improving collaboration even further, specifically in the way data is shared across the organization. The way the NIHR was initially organized meant that several data sources were unintentionally isolated within their host coordinating centers.

That meant they were effectively invisible to the rest of the NIHR. As staff worked more closely with one another, they realized that some information was available but not necessarily accessible to those who needed it, and the NIHR wanted to tackle this head on. We wanted to find a way of making all that information easily discoverable. The NIHR found its solution in Google Cloud Search , which seamlessly integrates with Google Workspace to provide search functionality across the entire technology infrastructure.

Over 16 weeks, the NIHR worked with PA to redesign its digital platform, placing Cloud Search at the heart, so that users could harness its power on a daily basis, sharing data and collaborating more quickly and easily than ever before. Soon, the NIHR faced a unique set of challenges: not only did it have to work within quarantine guidance, it also needed to shift its priorities to helping researchers tackle COVID As the situation unfolded, the NIHR set up and coordinated about 50 urgent public health studies into the effects of COVID, including two major studies of possible vaccines.

Typically, major research projects require months or even years to get off the ground, but the digital hub has helped the NIHR to spin them up within days and weeks. Studies like these require large numbers of people to meet and scrutinize a long list of supporting documents.

The NIHR used Forms to survey its members and partners and find the right people, while Google Cloud Search made vital information discoverable within seconds. Philip Hunt, the Minister responsible for health research from to , describes the enthusiasm for research felt by incoming Ministers:. After that, government policy actively called for more and better research, and enabled it starting with cancer. While Michael Peckham had been allowed to talk publicly about the aspiration of spending 1.

Rapid expansion followed, especially in the Comprehensive Spending Review. John Pattison. While funding became tighter after the banking crisis of , this positive environment for research continued a testimony to the convincing arguments being made by about its value for money.

The interviews and witness seminar provide a complementary range of perspectives on how the NIHR came into being and why it took the form it did.

This oral history approach adds to our understanding of current challenges in health research such as funding, sustainability and scope. Describing the period after , John Pattison recalls:.

And then all the other stars seemed to align themselves, when you think about it. Hugh Taylor adds:. Clearly, she and Nigel [Crisp, Chief Executive of the NHS] had a good rapport …, and she came with some ideas, but also … there was then a mounting sense of interest in the science agenda across government. I guess more questions were being asked about, to put it bluntly, what the money was being spent on, where it was going.

What does this history have to say to audiences beyond the United Kingdom? A brief comparison with three other countries which have also taken an interest in EBM — the United States, Canada and the Netherlands — may be informative here.

These countries have funded health research in somewhat different ways. In the United States, Holland noted the impressive depth and diversity of sources of research funding, including in his own field of epidemiological public health. Schools of public health, philanthropic foundations and the National Institutes of Health all contributed to this. His overall verdict was that fragmentation of health services among many payers meant that identifying priorities for public health research was harder.

Part of this problem of translation, in the United States, has been a growing perception among some politicians that health services research was partisan, and favoured the Clinton and Obama healthcare reform agendas. This has created a fraught environment for engagement between researchers and policy-makers [ 11 ].

Sally Davies is clear that this is partly due to the sense of Ministerial ownership which flows from running the programme within the DoH. In both the United States and the United Kingdom, the producers of guidelines have found it most effective to involve healthcare funders and the health professions as well as patients and the public in co-production.

In the United States, the National Guidelines Clearinghouse established in and the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute established in have been significant examples of this [ 53 ]. Canada established the Canadian Institutes of Health Research CIHR in , bringing together disparate elements of central funding, alongside provincial funding of health research. The CIHR, which has 13 virtual institutes for different research fields, has a mandate to promote multidisciplinary research and translation into patient benefit.

Both benefited from an early major injection of extra funding. A review of the CIHR suggested its impact had been highly positive, though identifying challenges in the co-ordination of different funders which resemble those seen in England John Kingman, interview 6 July Canada also benefits from a Canadian Health Services Research Fund, funded by an initial endowment which provides more independence from government than English equivalents. Its mission involves bringing together policy-makers and managers with health services researchers to foster the co-production of research, which is more likely to change practice [ 54 ].

Another feature the Netherlands shares with the other countries discussed is innovation in forms of co-production in health research [ 57 ]. This comparison with three similar countries suggests some messages for non-United Kingdom readers, at least in higher-income countries and perhaps more widely.

Unsurprisingly, levels of government investment in health research are critical, but it also matters what strings are attached — slightly less with more freedom over how to spend it may be better than slightly more under tight political control. Finally, research leaders find it valuable to secure the participation and buy-in of healthcare funders, health professions, patients and the public, not least in the development of treatment guidelines.

Hanney et al. We recall, though, that learning travels most effectively from one country to another when there is understanding of the varying context [ 58 , 59 ].

Our research shows, by adding the historical dimension, that, for an international readership, four points are salient about the English experience. First, there was an openness to applying the EBM approach at the level of services as well as clinical practice though less so at the level of governance. The publicly funded, nationally organised character of the NHS gave an impetus to this, because EBM supported a national emphasis on using research to get better value for money.

Second, the existence of a health service research organisation after , with high-profile research leaders, meant that reform was steered and championed by people such as Pattison, Davies and Hamilton, who assessed health research for its patient benefits and not simply for organisational benefits such as efficiency.

Third, the policy window of ca. Governments are not always willing and able to respond in this way. The public-sector nature of English healthcare also meant that government had much stronger levers with which to use health research in industrial policy — measures to improve the research infrastructure for commercial clinical trials would have taken a less direct form in a health system of private providers.

Fourth, while English conditions heightened the impact of government research policy on the health system, they also heightened the effects of changes in the health sector on research policy — in particular, fluctuating service funding in the s and s as well as the separation of purchasers from providers.

In these ways, the English experience since the s sheds light on the development of health research systems worldwide. All of them were figures in public life and many wish to preserve the confidentiality of their statements about policy debates and controversies. Health Res Policy Syst. Book Google Scholar. Knowledge for better health — a conceptual framework and foundation for health research systems. Bull World Health Organ. PubMed Google Scholar.

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