About

The NIHR Public Health PRU (PH-PRU) was established on 1st April 2019, evolving from the Public Health Research Consortium (PHRC) which preceded it, and was re-funded in 2024 with the aim of meeting Department of Health & Social Care (DHSC)’s needs for timely, relevant and robust public health evidence. Its research is delivered within four broad themes:

• Understanding what determines people’s physical and mental health, and behaviours (including multiple risk behaviours), and why there are differences between population groups.
• Identifying, developing and evaluating effective public health (PH) interventions (including developmental and evaluative research, and reviewing existing evidence)
• Generating evidence to inform strategies to reduce inequalities in health, and
• Developing new theories and methods, and new ways to apply them to the challenge of evidence-based PH policy (such as from PH economics).

Our research focuses on health inequalities, and how public health and other policies can improve public health and wellbeing. We see the particular focus of the PH-PRU as being on improving health and reducing health inequalities through the wider social and structural determinants of health. From this perspective, interventions (including policies) can influence health and behaviour through changing people’s social and living environments (broadly defined). Thus our research contribution is to understand how to change those environments to improve health, and to understand how those environments may prevent or promote better health.

Our Projects:

We have extensive experience across the wider social, environmental and structural determinants of health. Within the team we have conducted research on food and alcohol environments (e.g. evaluations of food, tobacco and alcohol policies; research on local planning systems); urban influences on health behaviours; evaluations of transport interventions; extensive research on employment and health (including disability and employment); and research on the interaction between social determinants and access to health and other services as well as air quality and climate change. As definitions of “wider determinants” have broadened in recent years to incorporate commercial determinants, our research reflects this and often leads the way. We have conducted extensive research on commercial influences and environments, and have extensive expertise in researching alcohol, food, tobacco, gambling, fossil fuel and other commercial influences on inequalities.

A unifying theme is the inclusion of inequality concerns into public health research and decision-making. Our research engages with issues of importance to excluded and stigmatised populations and projects have involve close working with these populations, including the evaluation of the “Everyone In” rough sleeping programme, and the co-produced ‘Routes’ project on health experiences during the pandemic among Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities. We conduct research through the life course –for example, through research projects which focus on children, families, and older people.

Expertise and methodology:

We are a multidisciplinary policy-facing public health research team spread across 6 universities: We have a long track record of observational, interventional and evaluative research addressing current and emergent public health challenges, that directly informs policymaking. This includes mixed methods evaluations, (including RCTs and natural experiments), evidence syntheses, surveys, modelling, decision analytic methods, and economic evaluations. Our expertise includes developing and disseminating new methods, including health economics methods – in the latter case, research on the wider social benefits of public health interventions) and development of new theoretical perspectives, such as research on intervention agency; on intervention-generated inequalities; and on the development of social determinants frameworks themselves. Our existing PRU projects also have a strong focus on qualitative methods and lived experience and we see this as one of our strengths, including in depth-interviews, focus groups and lived experience and secondary qualitative data analysis.

Dissemination

We produce a range of different types of output for academic, policy, practitioner and lay audiences: academic and non-academic papers; briefing sessions; workshops, animations and infographics.