Our work
We believe that the work that we do to support and foster innovation in health services research is vital. Our priorities are:
1. To convene, connect and support UK wide constituencies involved in producing or using HSR.
2. To mobilise HSR into practice, to support HSR capacity building and to achieve impact for HSR.
3. To influence policy leaders and funders to improve conditions for HSR and associated constituencies.
Our highlights of 2017
Over 250 delegates attended our annual Symposium in Nottingham where over 60 sessions and interactive workshops were presented. Bringing together the worlds of research, policy and practice, the event saw the emergence of a number of new partnerships and featured much impressive new research in Workforce, Improvement Science, Patient and Public Involvement , and many other key areas of HSR.
We held our Winter Seminar on New Care Models, which gathered an audience of over 60 researchers, service leaders and users to hear about the evidence and evaluation of New Care Models, with a particular focus Primary and Acute Care Systems (PACS) and Multispecialty Community Providers (MCPs). The seminar was a great opportunity to exchange knowledge about current efforts to bring innovation to the NHS from the bottom up, via local and regional experiments, across a range of new models of care (NCM).
We launched a series of "Policy Breakfasts" in Partnership with The Health Foundation. Our Policy Breakfasts are a series of roundtable events that will bring together leading researchers and service leaders to explore the impact of our health services research on the planning, delivery and experience of health care. Our first event on "Governing for Improvement" explored the role of NHS boards in ensuring quality improvement within hospitals and other healthcare settings. Speakers Naomi Chambers and Naomi Fulop shared recent research on how boards can best support high performance organisations, with responses from Suzie Bailey (Director of Leadership and Quality Improvement, NHS Improvement).
Read the blog from THF's Director of Improvement, Will Warburton "Stop the world, I want to improve: governing for quality improvement when there’s no ‘off switch’
A snapshot of what you can expect in 2018:
Our HSRUK Conference 2018 - The HSRUK Conference presents the leading edge of health services research. The programme is multidisciplinary and includes research presentations and posters, and plenaries from research and service leaders. Delegates attend from a range of organisations: NHS and social care bodies, patient and citizen groups, universities and research institutes, industry and commercial knowledge consultancy, central and local government and the third sector.
Co-producing Health Services Research: The hows and whys: This highly pragmatic and interactive day, co-organised by NIHR Knowledge Mobilisation Research Fellows and HSR UK, will bring together co-production partners such as service users, commissioners, practitioners, the third sector, and even creative artists to share what worked (and what didn’t work) in their experience of co-producing Health Services Research.
Health research policy in England: past lessons, future directions: This seminar will explore the development of health research policy and strategy in England – asking how policymakers, research funders, academic institutions, commercial companies, and NHS organisations have contributed to and shaped the health research policy in the past, and reflecting on the lessons for current and future directions in this area. The seminar will draw on recent research on the development of the National Institute of Health Research since it was created in 2006, and on the rather longer history of health research from the 1960s onwards. The aim is to contribute to thinking about how health research policy might develop in the future.
HSRUK-THF Policy Breakfasts on Winter Pressures: This roundtable event will look at how to respond to winter pressures, presenting the most current research and insights on this topic for discussion and debate. The event brings together senior NHS leaders, board members, policy makers and specialists in urgent and emergency care, as the second of a series of policy breakfasts in collaboration with the Health Foundation and Health Services Research UK.