By Professor Lindsay Forbes, Academic Lead for NIHR HDRC Medway and Public Health Theme Lead, Applied Research Collaboration, Kent, Surrey and Sussex.
In 2022 and 2023, the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) awarded five-year funding to 30 councils across the UK to host Health Determinants Research Collaborations (HDRCs).
Two councils in Kent, Surrey and Sussex were successful applicants: Medway Council in 2022 and Surrey County Council in 2023.
The aim of these collaborations is to develop research culture and infrastructure to build and use evidence to improve health and reduce health inequalities.
Since 2012, responsibility for the health of the population was transferred from the NHS to councils. The rationale for this was that health is largely determined by the physical, economic and psychosocial environment – things that councils can influence; health services have a fairly small impact on the health and wellbeing of the overall population. What did not transfer to all councils was the resource for building and using research evidence - fundamental enablers of health improvement.
The vision of HDRCs is that councils foster innovative and creative thinking, rigorously evaluate their activities, value the role of research evidence in decision-making, and are able to contribute to and draw on a rich evidence base for what they can do to improve health.
The NIHR Applied Research Collaboration Kent, Surrey and Sussex (ARC KSS) strongly supports the development of a strong research culture and infrastructure in local government. Members of the public health theme work with all the six county and unitary councils in KSS to support collaborations, capacity building and specific research projects.
Medway Council, in collaboration with the Centre for Health Services Studies at University of Kent and the people of Medway, is building a team and wider collaborations with the public and the voluntary and community sector to achieve the vision. Developing research culture means generating capacity, opportunity and motivation for research across the whole organisation, the councillors who lead it and the public who elect them.
We are proud of our enthusiastic public advisory group, the strong support from Medway’s councillors, our outreach to council officers, and our development of an innovative approach to deciding which research activities to prioritise. We have several research projects and fellowships ongoing and are seeking funding for further projects.
There have been challenges: building research infrastructure from scratch is hard and the lack of it means that many tasks take much longer than they might in universities or NHS trusts. But in the long run, we expect the HDRC to make the council a more effective organisation with a highly motivated workforce that is better able to improve the health of people living in Medway.
