National Institute for Health Research Dissemination Centre (NIHR DC)

Client

NIHR DC

Background

The NIHR is the  research arm of the NHS, the largest and most integrated health research system in the world. They carry out research that aims to make a difference to health practice and NHS treatment.

The NIHR DC is a collaboration between the Wessex Institute and Bazian.
 
We were invited to join the programme based on our reputation for innovative and efficient ways of working with evidence. The team consists of health analysts and writers who have experience in producing evidence-based analyses. The partnership aims to help healthcare practitioners, patients, and providers to understand and use research evidence. Ultimately the centre finds and promotes the best research and sets this into the context of NHS decision making.

The problem

Healthcare practitioners, patients and providers are often swamped in endless amounts of clinical evidence and research. Many of them do not know how to evaluate how reliable or relevant research is and how it fits into the context of NHS practice or what is already known on the topic. For busy people, there is not enough time to keep up to date with important topics.

What can help to overcome this challenge?

Our solution

Every week, we identify over 200 research papers to select those with findings that are important,  reliable and relevant. A panel of over 1000 front-line clinicians and patients help to select the most important for summarising. These papers come from both the NIHR and others who undertake systematic reviews or landmark trials, published in the top health, public health and social care journals. The research is then quality assessed, interpreted and summarised to produce different types of reports including Signals and Highlights.

Signals are plain-language research summaries of the most recent, relevant and important research. They are selected by our small team of health specialists, writers and experts and have an expert commentary. Highlights  are NIHR research in context, with contributions from patients, healthcare practitioners and researchers.

Both Signals and Highlights are freely available here, and are shared via Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook and email.

The outcome