The NIHR public health research programme: developing evidence for public health decision-makers

In 2008, the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) set up a new Public Health Research (PHR) programme. This aims to provide ‘new knowledge on the benefits, costs, acceptability and wider impacts of non-NHS interventions intended to improve the health of the public and reduce inequalities in health’. It has a budget of £10 m per annum. It will fund high-quality research to answer questions that matter to people in public health. The approaches will include both evidence synthesis and primary research. The primary research designs will be rigorous but not limited to randomized controlled trials (RCTs) and the programme is particularly interested in evaluating natural experiments. It works in both commissioned and researcher-led modes and its detailed plans are set out on the NIHR and the programme’s own websites. This paper describes some of the strategic and scientific challenges the PHR programme will have to address, and considers how it can contribute to developing evidence that is useful to public health decision-makers and practitioners. It illustrates these challenges with reference to a specific example of the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE) public health guidance—‘Interventions in schools to prevent and reduce alcohol use among children and young people’ (referred to hereafter as ‘alcohol and schools’).