Primary research with Local Authority Research Practitioners

Intervention of interest

The study seeks to evaluate a form of embedded researcher activity that seeks to facilitate and enhance cultures of research engagement and activity within Local Authority public health teams.

These facilitator roles – known as ‘Public Health Practitioner’ roles (PRPs) - are funded through the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR) as part of its Clinical Research Network (CRN). CRNs set out to support patients, the public and health and care organisations across England to participate in high-quality research, thereby advancing knowledge and improving care.

While our main interest is in CRN-PHP roles, we are interested in different forms of embedded researchers embedded into Local Authority Public Health settings.

Please get in touch with us if you would like to take part in this research.

Objectives

The aim of this evaluation is to document what happened during the implementation of CRN-PRPs and what influence they had. IThis study has the following objectives to achieve this aim:

1. To understand the nature of the CRN-PRP programme and its aims and to describe the context in which CRN-PRPs were introduced into Local Authorities

2. To describe and analyse the implementation of CRN-PRPs into Local Authoritiesand explore implementation factors such as reach and fidelity/adaptation.

3. To explore the influence of CRN-PRPs within Local Authority public health teams and to understand the mechanisms of influence within the CRN-PRP programme

Methods

This process evaluation will employ a mixed-methods approach to address the objectives above, and will involve the collection of new data, as well as the analysis of existing documents and data. No other (known) evaluation is taking place of the CRN-PRP programme.

In the objectives above we purposively use the terminology around ‘influence’ rather than impact or cause. This is due in part to the design of the evaluation, which both seeks to understand the process of implementing the CRN embedded researchers as well as some of the changes that CRN researchers can have on Local Authority public health team research activity.

As this evaluation activity takes place after most of the CRN Public Health Practitioners (CRN-PHPs) have been recruited, with some having been in place for some time, direct attribution of any changes or ‘impacts’ as being ‘caused’ by CRN-PHPs is challenging.

We will draw on mixed methods in order to influence of CRN-PHPs and will draw on two main approaches to do this (i) post-test evaluation; (ii) process evaluation involving process tracing (see section on design and evaluation considerations).