PUBLIC HEALTH RESEARCH IN WESSEX:

AN INTERVIEW WITH CIARA MCGEE, PHD

Ciara is an Embedded Research Associate within Southampton City Council, currently employed by the Clinical Research Network Wessex.

Tell me a little about you?

I completed my PhD in 2015 at Liverpool John Moores University which involved developing and evaluating a primary school physical activity intervention, using sport and physical activity to deliver smoke free messages to Year 5 children.

After my PhD, I worked as a Research Assistant within the Public Health department at the University.

A year later, I relocated to the South of England with family and started working for CRN Wessex. My role initially involved undertaking a scoping study to map the public health research landscape across local authorities and academia in the Wessex region.

Following this scoping study, the NIHR pledged to support public health research in non-NHS settings such as local authorities. This led to a unique opportunity to work within Southampton City Council public health team as an embedded researcher and I’ve been doing this role since April 2019.

What does your role involve?

Wessex CRN was one of the first networks to have an embedded researcher within local authority public health. When I started, there was no blueprint for the role and over time my role evolved.

Broadly, it involves raising awarness of CRN Wessex's support for public health research, and supporting the development of research funding applications and facilitating links with local academics.

As part of my role, I work very closely with Becky Wilkinson, Consultant in Public Health at Southampton City Council, who provides the strategic direction from a local authority perspective. We both work closely with our Public Health Speciality Lead, Professor Julie Parkes, who provides expert advice, support, and guidance for the role.

What projects have you been involved with?

In collaboration with Professor Julie Parkes and other senior academics at the Universities of Southampton and Bournemouth, we were one of 14 NIHR Local Authority Research Systems projects commissioned in 2020. We undertook a rapid qualitative study to better understand Southampton City Council’s response to COVID-19 and childhood obesity and the infrastructure needed to support and enable research within a local authority environment (McGee et al., 2022).

Through another successful application to the NIHR Public Health Intervention Responsive Studies Team (PHIRST), the public health team are working collaboratively with the University of Hertfordshire to conduct a realist evaluation to distil learning about programme theories, facilitators, and barriers of Southampton’s COVID-19 Champions network, Vaccine Champions programme, and its Community Participatory Action Research. Findings from this evaluation will be used to inform the development of Southampton’s future champion and community participation programmes.

Building on our previous work (McGee et al., 2022), we have recently undertaken a mixed methods study with council staff and elected members whose role impacts on the wider determinants of health. The aim is to find out who's involved in research, how data and evidence is used to inform decisions and what support teams and individuals would need to strengthen a more evidence-based approach. The analysis is underway and key findings will be shared later.

What is the council doing to encourage a culture of research within the local authority?

Southampton City Council has a new corporate plan which includes a transformation programme. One of its goals is to be a more intelligence-led authority, which means using good quality data and evidence to inform decisions. We are contributing to that with our recent mixed-methods study with staff and elected members. In addition to that, we held an informal research engagement drop-in event for colleagues across the council to come along and find out more about what opportunities there are to get involved in research.

Through this event and our mixed methods study, we have established a network of staff who are interested in being more involved in research and helping Southampton City Council to make better use of research evidence when making decisions. Through these developments and engagment across wider council directorates, it strengthens our position to collaboratively apply for funding to undertake research that is needed to better inform local decision making.

USEFUL LINKS:

NIHR PHIRST: Local government expressions of interest available at: https://www.nihr.ac.uk/documents/2214-phirst-local-governmentexpressions-of-interest/31639

NIHR PHIRST: Southampton Covid Participatory Action Research and Champions initiative Evaluation (CoPACT) available at: http://phirst.nihr.ac.uk/evaluations/copact/

McGee CE, Barlow-Pay M, Vassilev I, Baird J, Fenge LA, Chase D & Parkes J. Supporting and enabling research in a local authority (SERLA): an exploratory study. BMC Public Health, 22:1316. DOI https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-022-13396-2