Professor Stephen Hanney
Honorary Professor - Health Sciences

Summary

Emeritus Prof Steve Hanney has a PhD from Brunel University. He has spent over 35 years researching a range of topics, including: how to assess the impact, payback or benefits from health research; the use of research in policymaking; and how best to organise health research systems to maximise impacts and improve health and health systems.

Most recently, in 2025, Steve was one of the two HERG researchers appointed to be the economic advisors to the Wellome-funded, UN-inspired, planning phase of the global Evidence Synthesis Infrastructure Colloborative  (ESIC). This produced recommendations for how evidence syntheses could be made more relevant, timely and affordable, especially through the use of AI and Living Evidence Syntheses, in order, in particular, to boost progress across the Sustainable Development Goals. 

Earlier, starting in 1993, Steve, with Professor Martin Buxton, developed the HERG Payback Framework which they, and others, have applied to assess the impact of a range of health research programmes in the UK funded by the public sector and by medical research charities. Steve has collaborated on, or advised, studies applying the Payback Framework to health research in many countries, including: Australia, Bangladesh, Canada, Hong Kong, Ireland, Spain, the Netherlands, and USA. This stream of research also involved collaborations that produced the series of Medical Research: What's it Worth studies showing the high rate of return on UK public and charitably-funded research in fields such as CVD, cancer & musculoskeletal disease. The return on investment research also led to Steve leading an MRC-funded project analysing the time between starting research on a topic and its implementation to improve health, because the team identified this as one of the key factors influencing the rate of return on research funding. The project identified various factors that might reduce the time between starting a stream of research and its implenation. In 2020, Steve led some of the team members in a rapid demonstration of how far these factors were relevant as possible explantions for the dramatic reduction in the time taken to make research progress on vaccines and therapies during the COVID-19 pandemic.  

Building on the assessment of research impact, Steve also focused on ways to strengthen health research systems. He led an initial review examining the benefits of healthcare organiasations and staff being research active, and in 2024 helped on an update of that evidence synthesis led by Prof Annette Boaz. He has been a consultant to the World Health Organization, including in the early 2000s helping to develop the WHO framework for analysing health research systems and exploring how health research can be organised to inform health poicies, and then later, in relation to preparation for the World Health Report (2013), on the role of health research systems in improving health systems. From 2007-16 he co-edited the WHO-founded journal Health Research Policy and Systems. In the late 2010s he led a team conducting an evidnece synthesis for the WHO on how to  strengthen health research systems that was published in early 2020. The team used 2003 WHO framework for analysing health research systems Steve had helped to develop, and then with Canadian colleagues he again used the framework to analyse how seven health research systems responded to the COVID-19 pandemic, and the lessons from that.