Hi all, I was pleased to accept Neil's recent invitation to join HIFA and write an introductory email about my research. We agreed a suitable theme might be around the contributions that analysis of research impact assessments could make to understanding what evidence is commissioned/funded and used, and in what contexts and to what effect, to inform healthcare decisions?
For more than 3 decades I've developed, applied and analysed ways to assess the impact of health/medical research at the Health Economics Research Group (HERG), Department of Health Sciences, Brunel University of London. I'm now retired but keeping busy with issues related to this research. In the mid-1990s, I co-developed the Buxton/Hanney (or HERG) Payback Framework, which we, and then many others, have applied in many countries over the last 30 years to assess the impact of programmes of public or charitable-funded health research.
Tikki Pang's team working on WHO's Knowledge for Better Health Initiative invited me to join them in 2001 to ensure the assessment of research impact was included in the framework they were developing for analysing National Health Research Systems. Since then, I've worked on various WHO projects around organising health research systems to maximise impact.
Of course, there are now also many other frameworks for assessing research impact. I've reviewed these several times, most recently with a long-standing colleague from Alberta for an Aligning for Impact Workshop at Wellcome in April 2026. In June, I gave a presentation on this to WHO's Global Coalition for Evidence.
That led to the iteration with Neil, in which I suggested that while evidence syntheses clearly play a very important role in providing rigorous health information, impact assessments have identified various contexts in which single studies, or programmes, have made an identifiable and important impact on policies/decisions. Perhaps the most common form of impact on policies is the direct citation of a primary study on a clinical guideline.
Evidence from impact assessments seems to confirm that where the agenda for research is developed collaboratively with potential users of the research to meet their needs, it is more likely to be used in decision-making. This tends perhaps to be more related to local organisational issues than coverage decisions about specific interventions, but there, too, local research can sometimes be important.
Finishing for now with one, admittedly exceptional, example. Kok et al., 2016 reported considerable direct impact from a Ghanian-Dutch health research programme: "Research was most likely to be used when it was initiated and conducted by people who were in a position to use their results in their own work. The results of 17 out of 18 of these user-initiated studies were translated into action." Which health research gets used and why? An empirical analysis of 30 cases | Health Research Policy and Systems | Springer Nature Link<https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12961-016-0107-2>
HIFA profile: Stephen Hanney is Emeritus/Hon Professor at Health Economics Research Group, Brunel University of London, UK. Professional interests: Assessing the impacts or payback from health research; how best to organise health research systems to maximise impacts; the use of evidence in policymaking. Email address: stephen.hanney AT brunel.ac.uk