NIHR-supported incubator in oral health research: informing policy across the UK

About the incubator

The NIHR incubators address areas where there is a need to build research capacity on a national level. NIHR provides some funding to enable key stakeholders to identify the barriers that exist and to suggest and implement, where possible, solutions to building research capacity in a sustainable and meaningful way. 

This initiative aims to encourage early career interest in target disciplines to build identifiable communities through networking and the provision of bespoke training and development support. Incubators are virtual, managed across multiple sites and organised by discipline. They provide targeted high-level career development support, led by experts in the field and supported by the NIHR. Incubators are bespoke to meet the needs of each area and are developing at different paces.

Visit the NIHR incubator website

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Objectives

• Identify barriers to careers in oral health research amongst early and mid-career researchers.
• Develop an academic community able to co-design solutions to attract and retain oral health researchers within the workforce.
• Upskill this workforce to conduct high-quality, policy-relevant applied oral health research.
• Forge links between researchers, stakeholders and policymakers to identify areas for future research and devise a sustainable approach to maintain these links.

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Meet the team

Lead applicants

• Professor Zoe Marshman, University of Sheffield
• Professor Chris Vernazza, Newcastle University

Co-applicants

• Ms Irene Soulsby (Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement representative)
• Dr Hanya Mahmood (University of Sheffield)
• Professor Gerry McKenna (Queen's University Belfast)
• Professor Richard Watt (University College London)

Project manager

• Liz Cross, University of Sheffield

The work of the incubator will be overseen by a steering group including stakeholders across the devolved nations including academic institutions, patient and public involvement and engagement representatives, policymakers, NHS organisations, industry, research and specialist societies and bodies responsible for training.

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Work packages

The incubator will include five integrated work packages:

 WP1: Identification of barriers

A survey and focus groups will be conducted with the following target audiences: dental academics, dental care professionals, methodologists and policymakers. For dental academic and dental care professionals, this research will establish the pre-incubator distribution, the barriers faced, the need for skills development and identify those in need of mentoring. For methodologists, their views on how to promote high-quality applied oral health research will be obtained. For policymakers, their views on preferred ways of working with academics will be explored and priorities identified.

WP2: A community to build future oral health research capacity

This WP will centre around bringing together a community of those working or aspiring to work in applied oral health research, increasing the visibility of policy-relevant research and ensuring sustainable support.

Actions will include

• working with relevant organisations to address shared areas of concern relating to research capacity
• building a national applied research network with a wide remit regarding career stages and types
• creating funding opportunities that focus on applied research and are open to dentists and dental care professionals

WP3: Skills development

Policy-relevant research often requires applied research methods. Whilst some specialised activities should be undertaken by methodologists, working in collaboration with subject experts, there is a need for subject experts to have a good understanding of the principles of these methods and also for methodologists to have an understanding of the specialised subject area. In addition, there is a separate skill set for effective collaboration between policymakers and oral health researchers.

 WP3 will address this through a repository of co-developed training resources, including

• training in applied research methods (health economics, implementation science, use of routinely collected data)
• training in how to collaborate with policymakers and produce policy briefings plus media training
• patient and public involvement (PPI) training
• equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) training

WP4: Linking researchers with policymakers

This WP will raise awareness of oral health researchers working on policy-relevant areas and policymakers of each others work. The incubator will start by mapping where policy-relevant research is taking place and where oral health policy is made, drawing on stakeholders’ expertise. The incubator will hold a research/policy sandpit as one of its major events to determine key priorities for policy research (building on the existing JLA priority-setting partnership) and then to build collaborations to be able to co-design and deliver the research and then policy to deal with these identified priority areas.

WP5: Workforce development

The incubator will seek to make career pathways more flexible and appealing (through advocacy and partnership with those involved in their delivery) and to enhance support available for those embarking or already within the pathways, concentrating on mentorship. We will work with the NIHR academy and training stakeholders listed above to develop initiatives to address barriers to research careers at all levels. This will include exploring funding for the devolved nations, flexibility in requirements for speciality training for academics and the potential for more joined-up posts. We will create a mentoring scheme to include traditional and reciprocal mentoring and will explore the benefits of policy maker-researcher buddying. Four senior clinical academics have already committed to providing mentorship as part of the incubator.

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This incubator is supported by the National Institute for Health and Care Research. The views expressed on this website/webpage are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the NIHR or the Department of Health and Social Care.