Developing and evaluating an online community of practice for public health decision-makers

Public health describes measures undertaken to prevent disease, promote health, and prolong life among the population including the improvement of health determinants and reducing health inequalities. It can involve tackling society’s most pressing challenges – from thinking about ways of preventing and reducing knife crime to considering how best to enable to older people to maintain social connections to reduce social isolation and loneliness. Since 2013, most local public health decision-making takes place within local authorities (LAs), whose public health remit now includes commissioning services across most aspects of public health. This presents opportunities and challenges for researchers in working with local public health decision-makers to ensure that the evidence we produce continues to be useful and usable.

The challenge
The evidence we produce has the opportunity to influence local policy and practice to ensure that we improve public health outcomes for all and reduce inequalities. Working with LAs can mean that evidence on a broad range of issues can be used influence improve local public health, including evidence on the social determinants of health such as housing or transport. However, our own recent research has also uncovered that researchers need to work much harder and more collaboratively in order to support local public health practitioners, if we are to ensure that the research and evidence we produce is ultimately useful in improving the health of local populations. Greater collaboration, including more regular dialogue and sharing of skills and experience, could reduce the risk that evidence that could make a vital contribution to decision-making, is being overlooked, or is produced in a way that makes it redundant for local public health decision-making.

The project
This PhD studentship is designed for a candidate with a passion for using evidence to improve decision-making and applying this to improving public health outcomes. The aim of the project is to investigate a community of practice approach for public health practitioners and researchers to share information. Communities of Practice are self-organising and self-governing groups of people who share a concern, a set of problems or a passion about their field and strive, through collaboration, to become better practitioners. The use of a Community of Practice approach to bridge gulfs between Public Health Practitioners and Researchers working in academia is a relatively novel approach, and moreover, the effectiveness of the approach in increasing the effective production and use of public health evidence for influencing decision-making is not fully understood.

The main objectives of this project are:
(i) develop a Public Health Practitioner panel that convenes and shares information online with researchers;
(ii) develop metrics to evaluate the impact of a community of practice;
(iii) evaluate the impact of a community of practice in promoting the uptake of research evidence.
In previous work, we have found that communities of practice are a promising route for implementing guidance and evidence, and are used across other professional communities, although the impact within public health and the capacity to forge meaningful links with academics, is unknown. This project will develop a Public Health Practitioner panel as a small online community of practice, where public health practitioners working in local areas could help us to further understand their evidence needs on an ongoing basis and could describe ongoing issues around the implementation or incorporation of evidence into decision-making. Such a forum could also form the basis for sharing best practice around the use, identification or collection of evidence. This would also include organising an annual face-to-face workshop to provide further training on using and interpreting research evidence.

The studentship will also involve developing methods to evaluate the process of setting up a small-scale community of practice as an approach for building links between evidence users and generators, and potentially the impact on evidence generation and use practices.

About your background
The studentship is focussed within social sciences with a particularly concentration around public health, evaluation methods and implementation science - your background and experience may reflect one of these areas, or you may bring a passion for improving health through better evidence from another discipline.

While we have outlined a direction for this studentship, we would also stress that we would expect the student to take ownership of their own research. As long as the overall research is of high standard and within the remit of the overarching aims of the studentship, we will encourage and support the appointed student in shaping the PhD around their own interests.

Project-specific skills and experience required
Essential:
Mixed methods evaluation skills
Networking/communication beyond academia
Experience of working on public health research
Desirable:
Experience working with external stakeholders

Contact
For general enquiries, please email: [Email Address Removed]
For project specific queries, please contact: Prof James Thomas: [Email Address Removed]

Applications
Deadline: 29/05/19
Interviews: 13/06/19
Start date: 01/10/2019
For applications and other information please visit our main NIHR CLAHRC North Thames funded PhD studentships page: https://www.findaphd.com/phds/program/nihr-clahrc-north-thames-funded-phd-studentships/?i274p2695

CLAHRC Research area: Health Economics and Data