Health Determinants Research Collaboration (HDRC) - Learning and Evaluation Partner

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) is the nation's largest funder of health and care research and has a mission to improve the health and wealth of the nation through research. It does this by: • Funding, supporting and delivering high quality research that benefits the NHS, public health and social care. • Engaging and involving patients, carers and the public in order to improve the reach, quality and impact of research. • Attracting, training and supporting the best researchers to tackle the complex health and care challenges of the future. • Investing in world-class research infrastructure and a skilled research delivery workforce to accelerate translation of discoveries into improved treatments and services. • Partnering with other public funders, charities and industry to maximise the value of research to patients and the economy. The Health Determinants Research Collaboration (HDRC) is a new element of NIHR research infrastructure funded by its Public Health Programme that will be based in local government. The purpose is to enable local authorities to become more research-active, undertake new research and use existing evidence to inform our decision making, and undertake evaluation activities. There will be a central focus on health inequalities and actions to tackle issues faced by disadvantaged groups and areas. Portsmouth City Council has successfully bid to be one of thirty HDRCs nationally. Funding has been awarded for a Development Year from 1st January 2024 and, subject to satisfactory achievement of the agreed milestones for this year, for a full HDRC for five years from January 2025 until December 2029. Portsmouth is the UK's only island city and is the second most densely populated area in the UK outside central London. Portsmouth's HDRC programme will operate from Charles Dickens Ward (CDW) in the heart of the city, one of the 10% most deprived wards in the country (Indices of Multiple Deprivation, 2019) with parts among the most deprived 1% nationally. Residents in this and other areas of Portsmouth experience disadvantage in multiple ways and suffer significantly poorer health outcomes as a result. Our HDRC project will build relationships that support knowledge exchange (KE) between the council, Portsmouth communities, UoP and other collaborators to translate knowledge into action and support improved health outcomes. We are seeking to commission a learning partner to work with us to design and implement a developmental evaluation throughout the five years of our HDRC. We envisage this comprising a programme of work in which the evaluator supports the HDRC programme team to engage in action learning based on Plan, Do, Study, Act cycles (or a similar model). This will capture learning about what the programme is delivering, how/why our approach is working and not working, what we are learning about becoming a more research active organisation, and how the organisational culture is changing. The learning will inform further delivery of the HDRC. This will run throughout the delivery of the programme to support and report on ongoing organisational learning. Our HDRC model draws on whole systems approaches that recognise the complexity inherent in 'human systems'. We want to see proposals that engage with this, setting out how the learning partner would work with our HDRC team to design a layered evaluation strategy that includes elements addressing the following: • how our HDRC principles are meaningful to those working within the HDRC; whether they are adhered to; and to what extent and in what ways they are helping the programme to meet its objectives. • how the programme has delivered against the logic model that informed the bid to achieve impact. This will bring together a rich evidence base of whether, how, when, why and for whom the programme has created value and impact. • How the learning from our HDRC can draw on and contribute to the wider learning of the HDRC programme We want a learning partner who is embedded in the programme from the earliest possible stage and throughout the programme, building strong working relationships through including regular in-person delivery of co-designed evaluation activities and attendance at HDRC meetings in Portsmouth. We would not be able to accept fully remotely delivered proposals.