A new £5 million research programme which is intended to lead to an increase in service quality and patient safety through better ways of planning and providing health services was announced today by Public Health Minister Dawn Primarolo. The new Health Services Research (HSR) programme will provide funding across the UK for a broader range of health services research than is already covered by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) programmes. These include the Health Technology Assessment programme (HTA), the Service Delivery & Organisation programme (SDO), the Efficacy & Mechanism Evaluation programme (EME), Programme Grants for Applied Research and the Research for Patient Benefit (RfPB) programme.
These programmes are all specialist sub-sets in the field of health services research, which means that some projects may be difficult to fund because they fall outside of established NIHR funding streams, as well as those covered by the Medical Research Council and the Department of Health.
The HSR programme will fund research mainly through a researcher-led workstream, whereby grants are provided for both primary and evidence synthesis on topics proposed directly by researchers, on an ongoing basis. The programme may also advertise calls for research proposals on specific topics. The first call for expressions of interest will be taking place in January 2009.
For more details and to register your interest, please visit :
http://www.hsr.nihr.ac.uk