Abstract
There have been calls for greater exchange between research and practice in health care policy and management, but little empirical research on what commissioners of research and researchers themselves consider appropriate, good quality research knowledge. This paper addresses this gap, considering the views of commissioners and producers of policy and management research in health care and other fields. Qualitative semi-structured interviews with 18 commissioners and producers of research, in central government, the NHS and other commissioning organizations, and in universities and independent sector providers. Commissioners and producers agreed that research often fails to fulfil policy-makers' and managers' needs, and that greater interaction is required to improve this relationship. However, they offered differing accounts of the nature of research knowledge (as a 'product' or a 'mindset'), and of what constitutes value, validity and originality in research, reflecting the differing priorities and pressures faced by the two groups. Efforts to promote greater interaction between research, policy and practice, and more critical, reflexive engagement between policy-makers, managers and researchers, are likely to face significant obstacles given these competing constructions of research knowledge and their reinforcement by divergent priorities.
Highlights
Much attention has been devoted in recent years to the connections—and the frequent lack of connections—between research and practice in public management, including health services management research and policy
The last 10 to 15 years have seen an expansion in the volume of research relating to the organisation and management of public services, prompted initially in the United Kingdom by policy-driven efforts to reform the institutions of public services according to evidence of what works.[1]. In the UK and other economically developed countries, the drive towards improving links between research and policy has been driven in part by the remarkable ascendancy of evidence-based medicine,(2) which has in a matter of a few decades transformed the delivery of healthcare such that the requirement for robust evidence of efficacy and cost-effectiveness is central to medical education,(3) resource allocation[4] and professional regulation.[5]
Social research in healthcare is methodologically heterogeneous, and so the epistemological assumptions of the hierarchy of biomedical evidence, which proposes that some forms of research are superior to others, are inappropriate.[6]. Social research is frequently highly contingent upon local circumstance: specifics of context matter in a way in which they do not for most biomedical research.[7] social research can be used in diverse ways, not just as a straightforward instrumental guide to „best practice‟, and more conceptually, to challenge and change ways of thinking and approaches to the day-to-day issues facing healthcare managers.[8,9]
Summary
Much attention has been devoted in recent years to the connections—and the frequent lack of connections—between research and practice in public management, including health services management research and policy. Social research in healthcare is methodologically heterogeneous, and so the epistemological assumptions of the hierarchy of biomedical evidence, which proposes that some forms of research are superior to others, are inappropriate.[6] Social research is frequently highly contingent upon local circumstance: specifics of context matter in a way in which they do not for most biomedical (or at least pharmaceutical) research.[7] social research can be used in diverse ways, not just as a straightforward instrumental guide to „best practice‟, and more conceptually, to challenge and change ways of thinking and approaches to the day-to-day issues facing healthcare managers.[8,9] This has led several commentators to claim that a new way of conceptualising the relationship between research and practice is needed in relation to management and other social research, moving away from the linear and simplistic connotations of models of „knowledge transfer‟. The roles of research commissioners—and the views of both commissioners and producers on the commissioning process—have been neglected in the literature on research-knowledge utilisation
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