Health and Care Research and Evaluation Service

The Institute for Health and Care Improvement at York St John University is committed to improving the health and care of our communities, in partnership with health, social care and voluntary sector organisations across the region.

You can commission us to undertake research and evaluations of your services, interventions and initiatives for users and their carers, and your employees. An independent evaluation of your service or programme can demonstrate its impact and provide evidence to support your decision-making.

Our areas of expertise include project evaluation and primary research across a range of health and social care areas of focus.

What we can offer

We can support health organisations, local authorities, charities and third sector organisations.

Drawing on the vast range of academic expertise within the University, we can provide you with full research design, advice and consultancy. This will include project managing and undertaking research projects and service evaluations commissioned by you.

We will utilise a variety of methodologies including face to face interviews, focus groups, surveys, data collection and analysis, desk research and literature reviews.

We will analyse the resultant qualitative and quantitative data to produce full and/or summary reports for you, including interim reports where relevant.

Our research expertise

We bring together interdisciplinary academic expertise with users of research and wider groups/communities to exchange ideas, evidence and expertise in health and social care, and our staff include academics and clinicians with quantitative and qualitative expertise in a range of health and care related research.

Our research projects and evaluations involve children and young people, families, adults and carers, and professionals across the health and social care sector.

Our research expertise includes:

• Child development
• Counselling and therapy
• Disease detection and prevention
• Early parenthood, maternity and paternity
• Healthcare management and advanced healthcare practice
• Mental health and wellbeing
• Neurodiversity
• Nursing
• Occupational therapy
• Paramedic science
• Physical activity and health
• Physiotherapy
• Psychology
• Public health
• Reducing inequalities in health and care
• Sport and exercise science
• Supporting people living with dementia

Our current projects include:

• Feasibility of implementing a supervised exercise programme for people with intermittent claudication
• Evaluating research engagement with coastal communities
• Understanding what people with young onset dementia want from support services

Feasibility of implementing a supervised exercise programme for people with intermittent claudication

Lower-limb peripheral artery disease is a type of cardiovascular disease in which the blood vessels (arteries) that carry blood to the legs and feet are hardened and narrowed or blocked by the build-up of fatty plaques (called atheroma). The most common symptom of peripheral arterial disease is intermittent claudication, which is muscle pain or discomfort in the legs and/or buttocks brought on by walking and relieved within minutes on rest. Supervised exercise therapy is a safe, effective and low-cost intervention for improving health outcomes in people with intermittent claudication. Clinical guidelines advocate exercise as a first-line intervention. Unfortunately, access to supervised exercise programmes is highly variable across the United Kingdom.

York St John University are collaborating with York and Scarborough Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust to establish the York Claudication Exercise Service. Eligible patients will be offered 2, 60-minute supervised exercise classes each week for 12 weeks. This research project will investigate the feasibility of implementing this service, its effects on patient outcomes (for example, walking ability and quality of life), and if it represents good value for money.

Evaluating research engagement with coastal communities

Research engagement with communities is essential in understanding how best to tackle regional health priorities including health inequalities. However, ‘at risk’ groups (e.g., coastal communities) are often considered hard-to-reach. The Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care Board (H&NY ICB) geographical area includes a significant number of communities who would fall into this hard-to-reach category.

The focus of the overarching project is to engage coastal communities in research via Voluntary, Community, and Social Enterprise (VCSE) partners. Phase 1 of the Research Engagement Network Development (REND) project was designed to engage and start conversations about research with several VCSE organisations. This phase confirmed that coastal communities (who are impacted by health inequalities) do not traditionally engage with statutory services but do engage with VCSE organisations whom they trust to provide them with the support they need. As such, VCSE organisations provide an opportunity to develop links between researchers and hard-to-reach groups warranting further development of such partnerships.

Phase 2 of the project aims to: expand the programme to cover all of Humber and North Yorkshire Integrated Care Board’s coastal strip; provide VCSE partners with training to enable them to understand research and equip them with the knowledge/skills to communicate information about research to local communities; and facilitate trained VCSE organisations to engage the coastal population. The evaluation of the projects is to ascertain the impact/reach of the REND Programme and will include gathering the views and experiences of individuals who have been part of the Programme on the following questions:

• “Do participants feel more able to act as a voice for their community since being part of the programme?
• “What difference and/or shift has there been in people’s thinking about research following their involvement in the programme?”
• “Do participants feel that their involvement in the programme has made a difference, have they been able to influence/empower/mobilise communities to become research ready as a result?”
• “Do participants feel that the programme is sustainable in the long-term?”

Understanding what people with young onset dementia want from support services

Dementia Forward is seeking to develop a key resource and centre of excellence for people with young onset dementia. However, evidence appears to show that place-based services have not been as effective as anticipated, and Dementia Forward would like to understand why this is so and understand more about what those with young onset dementia need from a resource/hub, including gaps in the existing journey/pathways.

The research will include a desk review of published reports and papers on existing models of care for people with young onset dementia, after their diagnosis, that can offer support and activities. It will focus on models that have been formally evaluated, but will also look at relevant case studies.

In addition, we will be undertaking participatory action research with small groups of carers and those living with young onset dementia (if possible), that will focus on their experiences of support, looking at what was available, what they used and what they wanted including gaps in what is available. We plan to use the PhotoVoice participatory approach to collect feedback, as this is a methodology that can yield very rich qualitative data.

The feedback from the desk review and the participatory work could be used within a wider consultation run by Dementia Forward as they develop the Hub.

Contact us

For more details, contact us at ihci@yorksj.ac.uk.