The field of health services research (HSR) is intended to produce rigorous and relevant evidence regarding use, costs, quality, access, planning and organisation, financing, and outcomes of services that will lead to improvements in health and health services. HSR addresses the broad range of aspects of the quality of services: including access and equity in provision, relevance and appropriateness to the needs of individuals and communities, effectiveness and efficiency, how services are experienced. The NIHR HSR programme will therefore clearly address all three of the main dimensions of quality that currently are of central concern to the NHS: patient safety, patient experience and effectiveness of care.

Health Services Research commonly requires multi-disciplinary approaches to assess the quality and outcomes of services. Contributing disciplines include clinical research, epidemiology, health economics, medical ethics, social and behavioural sciences (including both qualitative and quantitative methods) and statistics. Both observational and experimental methods underpin health services research. Evidence includes both primary research and evidence synthesis. Most health services research is applied and policy oriented but basic research on methods and measurement may sometimes be required before a particular field can make further progress. For example, the availability of improved data from routine sources including linked records for English patients could provide new opportunities for:

• validating and applying indicators of health and health care
• identification of characteristics underpinning variations in process and outcome of care, including population based health outcomes and equity of access to care.

The NIHR HSR programme will mainly work in researcher-led mode but it may also call for proposals to commission in areas of strategic need. The types of projects that the HSR programme may fund include:

• Cultural and organisational issues around patient safety;
• Applied methodology research (that falls outside the MRC-NIHR Methodology Research Programme remit) such as development of patient-reported health status measures and specific risk adjustment models for existing databases;
• Making better use of existing research knowledge through modelling;
• Knowledge exchange/transfer within organisations;
• Measurement of quality improvement.

For further information please see the links on the right.