Research funding
The Health Economics Research Group (HERG), one of Brunel’s Specialist Research Institutes, has been awarded a programme grant from the Policy Research Programme at the Department of Health (DH) valued at £1.8million. This grant, for research on economic evaluation and health technology assessment of direct relevance to DH Policy, is for five years commencing January 2006. This is the fourth in a series of such grants from DH and will represent 20 years of continuous research support to HERG. This has provided a considerable degree of financial stability and increasingly we have been permitted to use this flexibly within the broad limits of the Programme's objectives. Thus it, and other relatively un-restrictive funding, has provided a method of tiding over research staff between the important but short-term contracts available from the NHS HTA and Methodology Programmes.
The award followed a demanding and rigorous review process last year. This combined peer review of the scientific merit of the research undertaken by HERG in the previous five years by a group of anonymous international reviewers and by a visiting review team of UK health economists, plus an assessment within the DH of the policy value and continued relevance of HERG’s work.
Professor Martin Buxton who has lead this programme since its inception, commented that the review process emphasized the challenge of such applied research, namely to achieve the highest international scientific standards whilst providing research that is accessible to policy-makers, and provides insights and analysis that can inform policy on issues that are often relatively intractable: “We are delighted that they have recognized our success in balancing scientific excellence and applied policy relevance’. In this next five-year programme, HERG is being asked to increasingly focus on public health issues, which figure large in the health policy agenda. The economic evaluation of public health initiatives raises additional and exciting methodological challenges and in meeting these challenges Martin Buxton will be assisted by Julia Fox-Rushby, recently appointed Professor in HERG, and by Brunel’s growing expertise in public health including Daniel Reidpath and Pascale Allotey, recently appointed Professors in the School of Health Sciences and Social Work.
Other research project funding is received from other parts of the Department of Health, the NHS R&D Programme, ESRC, MRC, major charities and industry.
