Evidence synthesis: establishing what works and size of public health need

Research theme leads

Daniela De Angelis, Dr (University of Cambridge MRC Biostatistics Unit)
André Charlett, Dr (Public Health England)

About this theme

This theme provides systematic review capacity for the HPRU, and uses Multiple Parameter Evidence Synthesis (MPES) to support public health surveillance and evaluation of health care programmes.

Objectives

Short-term objectives include:

scope, undertake, support and provide responsive capacity for systematic reviews on public health priorities;
devise robust approaches to estimation of the size of key risk groups within a population, e.g people who inject drugs;
develop models and methods that combine incomplete/biased surveillance data with other evidence to obtain robust estimates of trends in disease burden;
develop methods to integrate disease transmission models with evidence synthesis models of disease burden;
develop, adapt and demonstrate natural experiment methods of public health interventions.

Longer term objectives are to:

provide support and leadership on systematic reviews;
provide training on systematic review methods for HPRU and PHE staff;
develop and pilot methods for rapid mixed method systematic reviews;
develop and adapt novel methods for use in natural experiments utilising routine public health data;
provide methodological expertise, leadership and training on evidence synthesis – and create a methodological network of experts in quantitative methodologies for evaluation of natural experiments, including academics and PHE staff;
support and lead new external grant and fellowship applications on evidence synthesis methods;
support and lead new external grant applications on further evaluation of interventions developed under this theme;
assess how natural experiments and quantitative meta-analyses can better assess impact of interventions on health inequalities;
develop new guidance for outbreak reporting to strengthen evidence syntheses and to inform design/implementation of nested trials in context of outbreaks.

Key projects and outputs

Systematic Reviews & network meta-analysis: we will provide support for the generation of preliminary evidence for interventions identified by other work themes and HPRUs.

Multi Parameter Evidence Synthesis: We will use and develop methods that exploit multiple information streams to create new evidence for PHE.

Natural experiments: We will provide expertise on methods that use observational data to evaluate interventions, appropriately accounting for relevant sampling and other biases.