![]() ![]() Additional studies have focused on the research funding priorities of individual funding organisations, like the National Institutes for Health Research (NIHR), the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC) and the United States National Institutes for Health. The Public Health Innovation and Research in Europe project represents perhaps the most in-depth research on European public health research funders. With regards to strategic funding, little has been published on the strategies and priorities set by health research funding organisations. Although there is a dearth of data about the proportion of health research funds allocated to each of these types of programmes, it is understood that investigator-driven programmes tend to capture the majority of available research funds. Both types of proposals are usually evaluated by peer researchers for quality of the proposal and feasibility. Alternatively, in strategic research funding programmes, the relevance of a given research proposal to advance the research funding programme’s goals to impact people’s health is usually embedded in funding criteria. The relevance of investigator-driven research proposals is gauged by peer-researchers with criteria that are mostly related to the project’s capacity to advance knowledge. The former aims to be exclusively based on investigators’ creativity and their research ideas, whereas the latter proposes research topics based on strategic priorities to orient researchers’ requests for funding and overall research activity. This paper examines how health research funding organisations make strategic decisions to influence research activity through extramural programmes.Įxtramural research funding programmes are generally of two types, either investigator-driven or strategic. To fund research, philanthropic and government agencies may operate either intramural programmes, wherein researchers employed by the organisation conduct research projects, or extramural programmes, to which eligible researchers, mostly but not exclusively from academic institutions, may apply. A recent study shows that, globally in 2013, the 10 largest health research funders invested a total of 37.1 billion USD. In most high-income countries, health research funding represents a major investment for governments and philanthropic organisations. Because of its interdisciplinary nature, PPH research may be funded through social sciences or even natural sciences research funding agencies, yet it is usually funded through health research funding agencies. Population and public health (PPH) research is vital to improving the health of populations by advancing the knowledge of public health problems and solutions. There is an opportunity for greater breadth of participation and more transparency in priority-setting mechanisms for strategic funding programmes in population and public health research. Priority-setting for strategic funding programmes in public health research involves consultation mainly with researchers in the early phase of the process. the public, advocacy organisations) were not as frequently included. Funders generally involved the public health research community and public health decision-makers in idea generation and socialisation, but other groups of stakeholders (e.g. We found important distinctions in how funding organisations processed potential research priorities through four non-sequential phases, namely idea generation, idea analysis, idea socialisation and idea selection. MethodsĬontent analysis of published academic and grey literature and key informant interviews for five public and private funders of public health research in the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States and France were performed. Our objective was to explore how public health research funding organisations develop priorities for strategic extramural research funding programmes. While research priorities are often made public through targeted calls for research, less is known about how research funding organisations arrive at said priorities. Priority-driven funding streams for population and public health are an important part of the health research landscape and contribute to orienting future scholarship in the field. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |