Health Data Research UK is scoping expert views for a new initiative called Population Research UK (PRUK), on behalf of the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC), the Medical Research Council (MRC) and Wellcome.
PRUK will increase the insights, innovations and research efficiency of the UK’s wealth of social and biomedical longitudinal population studies (LPS) – cohorts, panel studies and record-linkage studies that all collect information from large numbers of individuals over time.
Through bringing studies and data together, PRUK will enable a greater understanding of the complex interplay between biological, social, economic and environmental determinants of health, social and economic outcomes, and address high-impact research questions that single studies cannot address alone.
PRUK will become a national data infrastructure with significant investment to support it. It will learn from and complement existing research infrastructures in an interdisciplinary way, to combine the biomedical, social and economic sciences. It will also focus on increasing research access and support services for new users of PRUK across academia, public bodies, charities and industry. The programme will support current LPS through tackling jointly, challenges in data curation, linkage and analytics, and create research efficiencies from doing things on behalf of the community that can benefit all.
To further define the requirements for PRUK, HDR UK is managing – on behalf of the funders – an open Design and Dialogue Programme with LPS leads and the teams that manage studies, researchers that use and access LPS data, wider stakeholders, and the public, to fully develop PRUK. This scoping exercise will put user needs at the centre of PRUK specifications, and involve close collaboration to learn from the existing research initiatives, plus the infrastructures that support and deliver LPS research.
Following the Design and Dialogue Programme, it is expected that a funding call will be announced jointly between the three funders in autumn 2021 for leadership and partners to deliver and develop the next steps of the PRUK. This survey forms one part of this PRUK Design and Dialogue Programme.
Your views and current experiences of working in the LPS field, plus your ideas on what should be prioritised in the development of PRUK will be of great value to HDR UK.
Completion of this survey will take about 15 minutes and all entries will be anonymous. Responses will be stored for up to five years. Findings and recommendations from the PRUK Design and Dialogue Programme will be shared on the PRUK webpage.
Complete the survey here. Submission deadline is 9 April.