Top Tips - Health and Social Care Delivery Research (HSDR)

Workstreams

• Commissioned workstream focuses on evaluating models of service delivery and interventions that have the potential to improve service effectiveness, efficiency, and productivity.
• Researcher-led workstream focuses on research into the quality, appropriateness, effectiveness, equity, and patient experience of health services.

Funding

HSDR has a budget of around £60million a year for the commissioned and researcher-led streams combined. The average duration is 24 months for £260K, using mainly mixed methods.

Key facts

Key criteria for the commissioning board: durability and continued relevance (3-4 years’ time).

There is a high dropout rate for projects. Twenty percent of projects fail to fall within either the programme or the call remit. For those that are in remit, 1 in 2 projects will be shortlisted and 1 in 2 of the shortlisted projects actually receive funding. Once through the remit check, a project has a twenty-five percent chance of being funded.

The funding programme accepts both quantitative and qualitative primary and secondary research. All applications for funding must have a clearly defined research question; clear aims and objectives and a well-designed study methodology to meet the aims and objectives.

Types of projects sought

• Ambitious large-scale studies of national importance that are solution-based. (HSDR receive many organisational case studies that define the problem very well but don’t provide actionable findings).
• Range of studies (including evidence syntheses costing around £100K) looking at what works, what works best and at what cost.
• HSDR will accept major implementation studies, pragmatic trials and ethnographic research

Hints for the application form

Introduction

• This is critical at the outline stage. You need to state the justification for the project, why it needs doing and why now.
• It is not enough to say that the issue is common or serious: you must explicitly say which of the HSDR NEEDS are being addressed.
• If you have pilot data include it in the introduction.
• The intervention context specific to HSDR funding will be staff-based and different from the therapeutic interventions. Any context features should be well specified. HSDR have developed a checklist with prompts to consider different aspects of complex service interventions and context- navigate the webpages for the checklist.
• Although the focus is on improvements in health and social care delivery, applicants need to describe potential patients benefit and impact from the research.

Team

• Make sure you state the expertise of your team explicitly in the application, as the panel will not read CVs to establish if a team can deliver on the project.
• Project management expertise is important.
• NHS, policy or public co-applicants can significantly strengthen your team.

Aims and objectives

• Ideally have one aim and a few objectives, with each objective explicitly linked to a phase, study or method.
• Keep it simple: a strong, tight narrative makes it readable and understandable and can demonstrate that it is achievable.
• Keep a good balance between being achievable and moderate risk.
• When you have risk, show that you are aware of it, can manage it and have a rescue plan in mind if things go wrong.
• Ideally, underpin your work with theory and an appropriate framework for the intervention. Demonstrate how you will use the theory – rather than just referencing it.

Money

• Asking for too little is riskier than asking for too much! Value for money does not mean cheap: it means the right amount to deliver the project.
• Value for money is usually negotiated after it has been agreed that there is a need for the project and that the methods will deliver solutions.
• Make sure you cost in the direct costs of good public involvement and any advisory groups you use.

Time

• HSDR projects are monitored at six-monthly intervals, so think about how this will fit in with your project stages.
• Budget time for writing! The final report is the size of a PhD.

Public involvement

• Sometimes projects are too technical to attract public involvement during the work-phase, but it can be very well used in the dissemination side of your project.

Process

Applications are usually assessed using a two-stage process.

During Stage 1, applications are checked against the programme’s remit and for competitiveness. Eligible applications are passed to a panel for workstream shortlisting.

If an application proceeds to Stage 2, external reviewers will see the application and their questions will be fed back to applicants for comment. The application and reviewer feedback will then go before a Commissioning Board, who may recommend that the application be funded (with or without changes), rejected, or resubmitted.

If the recommendation is to fund the project, a contract will be issued once any changes are agreed.

 

Author: Rachel Evley          Created: March 2021    Last Updated: December 2022