Measuring the impact of health and medical research
Contact: Prof Stephen Hanney
There is increasing interest in assessing the ‘payback’ or wider impacts from health research. HERG has played a leading role in developing this area, and the pioneering Buxton and Hanney Payback Framework is viewed internationally as one of the major approaches to use in such assessments. The HERG payback framework consists of a multidimensional categorisation of benefits from research and a model of how to assess them. The stream of work began for the national Department of Health in 1993 but has expanded in various ways since then. The multi-dimensional framework has been applied in the UK and elsewhere to assess the impacts of an increasingly wide range of health research, including that funded by medical research charities and programmes from research councils, including one from the National Institutes of Health in the USA. Some projects have focussed on developing new ways to assess specific impacts, including a study that estimated the value of UK medical research. The stream of work has also expanded more widely to consider how health research systems should best be organised to enhance the impact of their research and improve healthcare systems.
