A co-production approach to public health evaluations in North-East England’

SHAPE - a SHared learning And co-production approach to Public health Evaluations
Grant McGeechan, Gillian O’Neill, Dorothy Newbury-Birch

Public health initiatives tend to be complex and context specific. It is imperative that these initiatives are evaluated to prove effectiveness. The most rigorous evidence available to inform public health policy is often dominated by tightly controlled, intervention trials conducted by universities. Such evidence can raise questions regarding the applicability and transferability of research to ‘real world’ practice. A co-production approach involving academics and practitioners in all aspects of an evaluation can lead to more translational research, with the evaluation benefiting from their differing skill sets and experience.
Newcastle University and Durham County Council are engaged in an innovative programme of translational research involving a true collaboration to scale, differing from the traditional model of one off evaluations. A researcher from Newcastle University is collaborating with public health practitioners from the local authority on a series of evaluations from development to dissemination. The researcher spends time working with the local authority to learn about policy, governance issues, and data sharing agreements. The practitioners spend time at Newcastle University developing research skills, working on literature searches, data entry and analysis. Each evaluation is overseen by a steering group, consisting of key stakeholders from the university, local authority, and clinical commissioning groups, responsible for the overall management of the evaluations.
This research in collaboration with FUSE (The Centre for Translational Research) will be used to inform the development of an interactive toolkit which can be used by public health practitioners in practice to assess the effectiveness of public health initiatives.