Does health intervention research have real world policy and practice impacts?

Since the 1980s there has been a growing expectation that health research will have direct social and economic utility and impact. Research funding submissions require applicants to predict the practical benefits that might flow from their planned studies. However, a large proportion of funded research fails to translate into real world solutions.

In practice, assessments of research impacts are mostly commissioned by governments to determine the public benefit from research spending. Governments are increasingly signaling that research metrics of research quality are insufficient to determine research value because they say little about real-world benefits of research.

In this paper, the authors build on the existing literature to propose an expanded ‘impact assessment’ framework, and apply a model which builds on current best practice to 5 years (2003–2007) of intervention research funded by Australia’s peak health and medical research funding agency, the National Health and Medical Research Council (NHMRC).

Their primary aims were to i) pilot a modified impact assessment process and ii) determine what proportion of intervention projects had any demonstrable impact on subsequent policy or practice in ‘real world’ settings .