The following NIHR Public Health Research (PHR) Programme calls have been announced:
- 24/59 Behavioural overweight and obesity management interventions that include long term support in achieving and maintaining weight loss in children and young people.
- 24/60 Unmanageable debt.
- 24/61 Healthy homes: overcrowding.
- 24/62 Active travel facilitators and barriers within different populations.
- 24/63 Workforce health.
- 24/64 Public Health Intervention Responsive Studies Teams (PHIRST) – process and outcomes evaluation.
With the exception of opportunity 24/64, there is no upper limit to the amount of funding researchers can apply for.
Deadline for stage one applications: 13 December 2024
Additional information for each programme is provided below. Links to ‘further details’ contain commissioning briefs, guidance notes, timescales and registration forms for the applicant support webinar on Wednesday 9 October 2024, 11:15-12:30.
Got an idea and not sure how to turn it into a funding application? Please consult the NIHR Research Support Service Specialist Centre for Public Health (SCPH) about the design of your research as soon as possible.
24/59 Behavioural overweight and obesity management interventions that include long term support in achieving and maintaining weight loss in children and young people.
Research question: What is the effectiveness and cost effectiveness of behavioural overweight and obesity management interventions that include long term support in achieving and maintaining weight loss in children and young people?
Suggested research areas of interest could include (but are not limited to) an evaluation of:
- The longer-term effectiveness (5 to 10 years) of behavioural overweight and obesity management programmes for children and young people.
- Interventions aimed at male children and young men.
- Effective behavioural overweight and obesity management programmes for children and young people with disabilities, learning difficulties or other special needs.
- Effective and cost-effective approaches to overweight and obesity management for children younger than six years, including the views of their parents and families.
- How the barriers to, and facilitators for, participating in behavioural overweight and obesity management programmes vary according to socioeconomic group, ethnicity, gender and age.
- Evidence on the lifetime effects of overweight and obesity management programmes.
24/60 Unmanageable debt
Research question: What interventions affect the impact of unmanageable debt on health and health inequalities?
Research areas of interest could include (but are not limited to) evaluation of:
- Interventions that take into account differing types of creditors, for example legal and illegal money lenders.
- Interventions that seek to work with individuals and/or families experiencing pre-existing debt.
- Interventions that take into account unmanageable debt experienced at different stages of the life course, including unmanageable debt experienced towards the end of life
- Interventions that offer support tailored to the type of debt experienced, such as priority and non-priority debt (priority debt being debt that may carry more serious consequences if not paid, such as losing one’s home).
- Interventions related to debt owed to public sector organisations and associated debt collection practices.
- Interventions that seek to work with legal creditors to improve practices and hence customer experience.
- Interventions that take a multisectoral approach to addressing unmanageable debt and its health impacts (for example, that involves public authorities working in partnership with third sector debt support and advice providers to find sustainable ways to deal with unmanageable debt, which may be owed to multiple agencies and authorities).
- Interventions that seek to prevent a worsening of debt for people who are already in financial difficulty, or who are on the verge of having (unmanageable) debt.
- Interventions aimed at people from vulnerable groups including, but not limited to, those with pre-existing health conditions, migrants with NRPF, and those who may be digitally excluded.
- Interventions aimed at those on lower or insecure incomes, people in receipt of benefits, whose housing situation is precarious, or who have other risk factors – including consideration of how well those interventions reach those who could benefit.
24/61 Healthy homes: overcrowding
Research question: What interventions impact overcrowding in housing in the UK?
This call is predominantly interested in the evaluation of interventions operating at a population or sub-population level rather than at an individual level. Interventions should address health inequalities and/or the wider determinants of health. The PHR Programme recognises that interventions are likely to impact different (sub)populations in different ways, and encourages researchers to explore such inequalities of impact in their study design.
Of importance to the PHR Programme is an understanding of inequalities in the impact of interventions on people from particular demographic groups in the UK. Evaluations of interventions seeking to reduce health inequalities experienced by people from ethnic minority backgrounds are of specific interest.
Research areas of interest could include but are not limited to:
- The impact of local authority housing policies and neighbourhood planning on overcrowding.
- Interventions to alleviate problems of overcrowding in Houses in Multiple Occupation (HMO) and temporary accommodation.
- Positive and negative impacts of relocation interventions to make best use of available housing stock.
- Evaluations of interventions that impact overcrowding that affect physical features of the home, for example:
- Interventions to change design and layout, or to extend homes.
- Interventions which impact access to outside space.
- Interventions which impact the provision of housing services, repairs and regular maintenance for homes where not all of the space is fully functional.
- Evaluations of interventions which mitigate the impact of overcrowding during extreme weather events or during emergency response and recovery (e.g., heat and cold, fire and flooding).
- Interventions external to the home which mitigate the impact of overcrowding on specific populations, for example, access to publicly or communally available facilities or services for children and young people.
- Research focused on populations who are particularly at risk from the effects of overcrowding, such as people with pre-existing health conditions, disabled people, or people from certain demographic groups, for example, asylum seekers.
- Effectiveness of interventions that provide advice, support and signposting on, for example, priority banding, housing register applications, transfer applications, mutual exchanges.
- Local authority strategies focused on working with registered social landlords or private sector landlords, for example interventions which aim to reduce the number of empty properties.
- The role for decision-makers in the use of timely and relevant data in understanding the scale of local overcrowding.
24/62 Active travel facilitators and barriers within different populations
Research question: What are the health and health inequality impacts of interventions that affect active travel behaviours (at a population level)?
Active travel includes all modes of travel that involve some degree of physical activity, such as walking, cycling and other types of wheeling. Public travel refers to journeys made using public transportation systems and will often include an active travel component.
This call is broad and the intervention examples given below are not exhaustive, nor are they mutually exclusive:
- Interventions aiming to address behaviour change, including personal and social barriers and facilitators of active travel.
- Interventions of the physical environment to facilitate active travel, including infrastructure changes and active travel initiatives that do – or do not utilise community collaboration.
- Different modes of travel, particular multimodal travel and interventions aimed at increasing walking.
- Interventions to address the facilitators and barriers to active travel by different population groups (this could include consideration of age, gender, socio-economic group, ethnic minority groups, and disability).
- Interventions to reduce inequalities in active travel.
- Interventions in different settings of active travel (urban, suburban, rural) and/or scaling up of local interventions.
24/63 Workforce health
Research question: What are the most effective interventions that organisations can adopt to improve the physical and mental health of the UK workforce?
This call is predominantly interested in the evaluation of interventions operating at a population or organisational-wide level, which should address health inequalities and the wider determinants of health. The PHR Programme recognises that interventions are likely to impact different (sub)populations in different ways, and encourages researchers to explore such inequalities of impact in their study design. It is less interested in the evaluation of individual-level interventions.
Of particular importance is an understanding of inequalities in impact of policy and access to services by people from ethnic minority backgrounds in the UK. Evaluations of interventions seeking to reduce health inequalities experienced by people from ethnic minority backgrounds are also of specific interest.
This call is broad and expects researchers to be targeted in their research. Some of the research areas of interest identified in NICE guidelines and other recent relevant reports are suggested below. The list is for example only – it is not exhaustive, and applicants are welcome to focus on alternative areas:
- Research on the effectiveness of workplace health interventions that target the needs of specific population groups under-served by research in this area including, for example, employees from ethnic minority groups, disabled people, people with caring responsibilities, people with long-term conditions, employees working in specific employment sectors and people extending their working lives.
- Research on interventions that aim to support women’s health in the workplace including, for example, interventions related to pre-menstrual tension and menstruation, menopause, problems with breastfeeding, breast cancer.
- Research on interventions that aim to support specific occupations where there are gaps in the evidence base, such as, serving personnel and people working in the education sector.
- Research on interventions to protect and promote health and wellbeing in workers in SMEs, family businesses (for example local shops), precarious work, self-employed or other specific occupation groups outside larger organisations.
- Studies of interventions that aim to reduce the impact of musculoskeletal problems.
- Studies of interventions to reduce sedentary behaviour, including for example studies with longer-term follow up, and comparisons of different geographically-based initiatives or different types of organisations.
- Studies that aim to increase mental wellbeing over the medium-to-longer-term, for example in low-paid or low-control work environments, or high-performance, high-pressure cultures.
- Research to identify which mental wellbeing and productivity outcomes should be used in a core outcome set for future research into workforce mental wellbeing.
- Research investigating the impact of the introduction of reporting on mental wellbeing and workforce health.
- Evaluations of interventions that support entry or return to work after long-term and recurrent short-term sickness absence.
- Evaluations of interventions designed to support people known to have higher sickness absence rates including people working part-time, women, and people working in caring, leisure, and other service occupations.
- Research on the health and health inequalities impacts of: changes to job design, changes to working practices, home and hybrid working, and the effect that these changes might have on, for example, younger people, older people, different employment sectors and socio-economic groups, and the maintenance of boundaries between work and home life.
- Research on the impacts of new and emerging technologies on the physical and mental health of the workforce.
- Investigations of organisational and system-based factors which impede or assist implementation and sustainability of workplace health interventions.
24/64 Public Health Intervention Responsive Studies Teams (PHIRST) – process and outcomes evaluation
The PHR Programme is accepting Stage 1 applications to undertake a process and outcomes evaluation of the Public Health Intervention Responsive Studies Teams (PHIRST) scheme.
The evaluation is expected to provide robust insights into PHIRST scheme processes and the difference it is making (outcomes and emergent impacts). The evaluation will provide key information to the NIHR regarding whether the PHIRST scheme is meeting its goals and remains fit for purpose. Recommendations should be made to inform the future of the scheme.
The PHIRST scheme operates a model whereby local government teams can put forward their local interventions for evaluation. At set intervals – currently twice per year – the PHR Programme prioritises several of these interventions based on public health importance and other factors. Prioritised interventions are then allocated to PHIRST teams, who lead on scoping out and conducting an evaluation, working in partnership with the local government team.
It is anticipated that the evaluation will begin in late 2025 and take between 12 and 15 months. The estimated budget is between £250-350k.