Postgraduate Research Degrees – HRB PhD Scholars Programme in Health Services Research

Core HSR Skills of Programme Steering Group

These are described in detail next, organised thematically from Population Heath through Health Policy.

Chronic Disease Epidemiology, Population Health and Public Health Medicine:

While the fundamental societal determinants of health lie outside the health system, the performance of health systems is an increasingly important determinant of health, especially in developed countries with an ageing population profile such as Ireland. It is therefore essential that HSR training is grounded in a broader population health perspective.

Health Psychology - Individual Behaviour in Health and Illness and Healthcare:

The perspective of the individual – as member of the population (health), as patient (illness) and as service user or provider (healthcare) – is an essential component of HSR. Scholars will learn about concepts of, and assessment of, patient reported outcomes from pain through health status to individual quality of life. A framework for assessing the psychological and social impact of health conditions and interventions will be introduced. This will be considered in a developmental perspective so that health issues across the lifespan from child through to old age can be appreciated.

Primary Healthcare:

Primary healthcare can be defined as first contact, co-ordinated, comprehensive and continuous care given to an individual in a community-based setting. Appreciation of the role and function of primary care in terms of healthcare delivery is a key component of HSR at the individual and population level. Context-specific healthcare issues in primary care and at the primary/secondary care interface will be combined with rigorous training in systematic reviews, observational epidemiology and randomised controlled trials.

Pharmacoepidemiology and Therapeutics:

The science of pharmacoepidemiology is well advanced. The aim here is to consider healthcare not alone from a pharmacoeconomic perspective, but also to examine service utilisation, a therapeutic gap where individuals are not receiving best therapy and also risk through excessive polypharmacy or inappropriate dosage or potential drug toxicity.

Oral Health Services:

Oral health services provide a microcosm of many of the challenges of the overall health services. Oral health services research provides a convenient training opportunity for researchers. It encapsulates environmental issues such as water fluoridation, individual developmental challenges in terms of differing needs across the lifespan and challenges of health technology assessment, equity and reimbursement issues.

Health Informatics:

Healthcare is an information intensive industry generating enormous volumes of information every day in hospitals, GP surgeries, clinics and laboratories. The application of ICT in healthcare, now generally known as Health Informatics, is a complex and intellectually demanding interdisciplinary field in which Medicine, Computer Science, Management Science, Statistics and Engineering are all represented. Health Informatics is a central means of improving the overall efficiency, effectiveness, and safety of healthcare delivery, and thus a core concept for HSR researchers.

Health Economics:

Health economics plays an important role in HSR in two main areas:  economic evaluation of health care interventions and in economic analysis of health systems and health care delivery. In most cases the contribution made by health economics is in the context of multidisciplinary teams of researchers.   It is expected that some scholars on the programme will come from an economics background and will choose to carry out health economics research for their thesis, but it is also likely that there will be scholars who use some economic insights and perspectives in carrying out multidisciplinary work.

Policy Analysis:

Policy analysis approaches and tools are used to support HSR in two ways. First is their application in retrospective analyses to identify what have been the enabling factors and obstacles to translating research-based evidence into policy decisions, and ultimately into effective health action. Secondly, there is the prospective application of these research methods, which enables and entails researchers to interact with policy makers and more directly influence evolving policy processes.  The Scholars programme will promote understanding and use of these research methods.

Crosscutting Expertise:

The themes selected for PhD theses could be in many of these areas - for example, research into the optimal configuration of services for stroke patients – primary care, acute hospital care, residential care – could be undertaken through applying one or more of the following methods: epidemiology, psychology, primary care, economics and policy analysis.