Making Research Matter Comment on "Public Spending on Health Service and Policy Research in Canada, the United Kingdom, and the United States: A Modest Proposal".

David J Hunter,John Frank

doi:10.15171/ijhpm.2017.97

Abstract

We offer a UK-based commentary on the recent "Perspective" published in IJHPM by Thakkar and Sullivan. We are sympathetic to the authors’ call for increased funding for health service and policy research (HSPR). However, we point out that increasing that investment – in any of the three countries they compare: Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom– will ipso facto not necessarily lead to any better use of research by health system decision-makers in these settings. We cite previous authors’ descriptions of the many factors that tend to make the worlds of researchers and decision-makers into "two solitudes." And we call for changes in the structure and funding of HSPR, particularly the incentives now in place for purely academic publishing, to tackle a widespread reality: most published research in HSPR, as in other applied fields of science, is never read or used by the vast majority of decision-makers, working out in the "real world."

Highlights

The importance of, and need for, robust health service and policy research (HSPR) is well articulated by Thakkar and Sullivan in their perspective article.[1]. They claim that the funding devoted to HSPR is not in keeping with its value and importance certainly as far as the United Kingdom is concerned, there are early signs that this imbalance has been acknowledged but is being actively addressed, as we will demonstrate
Their comparison of “dollars spent” in 2010 on HSPR in Canada, the United States and the United Kingdom, is incorrect, in that it fails to adjust for the fact that virtually all Canadian research grants – unlike those in the United States and the United Kingdom – pay no portion of any investigator’s salary, and only a paltry overhead to their institution
Based on the second author’s many years of grant writing and adjudication in all three countries, he reckons that these differences mean that a grant for research costing “x” dollars in Canada typically costs about twice that in the United States, and slightly more in the United Kingdom

Summary

Introduction

The importance of, and need for, robust health service and policy research (HSPR) is well articulated by Thakkar and Sullivan in their perspective article.[1]. The importance of, and need for, robust health service and policy research (HSPR) is well articulated by Thakkar and Sullivan in their perspective article.[1] They claim that the funding devoted to HSPR is not in keeping with its value and importance certainly as far as the United Kingdom is concerned, there are early signs that this imbalance has been acknowledged but is being actively addressed, as we will demonstrate.

Results

Conclusion