Last month Rebecca O’Connor from ROC Research Consultancy was invited to chat to Matt Evans from Active Lincolnshire and Charlie Coward from Active Dorset on their Tale of Two Counties podcast. Since the summer of 2021, Active Lincolnshire have been working closely with Active Dorset in order to share learning and develop their ability to work in the Health and Care sector. ROC Research have been evaluating this work using their embedded researcher approach. 

To share what they have both leant from working together, Matt and Charlie have produced a podcast series to help Active Partnerships across the country and others build confidence in their work to embed physical activity in health and care pathways as the new ICS structures emerge and develop their ability to work in the Health and Care sector. The series gives a fascinating insight into working in complex health systems and in episode 6, Rebecca  talks with Matt and Charlie to discuss how this work has been evaluated and some of what has been found, as well as the principles around monitoring 'systems working' rather than counting outputs. Have a listen here to find out more about how Rebecca and ROC Research work with organisations to help them make sense of the complex work they are involved in.

In April 2020, Sport England launched the Tackling Inequalities Fund (TIF) to make £20m of National Lottery funding available to support community groups in maintaining connections and physical activity opportunities in the recovery from Covid-19. The TIF also intended to support those disproportionately affected by Covid-19 and prevent the inequalities gap from widening due to falling activity levels. As part of a larger evaluation, ROC Research Consultancy conducted a short evaluation of TIF in Lincolnshire to understand how partners are working together to tackle health inequalities. 

Active Lincolnshire have been working with existing partners, and many new partners to support their applications to Sport England’s TIF. With an over 80% application success rate, £248,000 was distributed to a wide variety of projects aimed at helping people be more physically active. Through the evaluation, we learnt that key to the success of TIF was the way that Active Lincolnshire work with partners, and how are partners work with them. Active Lincolnshire had a great understanding of the physical activity opportunities and barriers across Lincolnshire, and worked hard to develop really strong relationships with partners. Active Lincolnshire also highly valued partners’ deep understanding of the communities and networks they worked with. This knowledge enabled Active Lincolnshire to work collaboratively with partners to make high quality, but realistic applications to TIF with an emphasis sustainable physical activity opportunities. A by-product of the collaborative approach were connections with new partners across Lincolnshire who were interested in working in the same way to develop and lead new and innovative approachs to tackling health inequality through physical activity. 

Click here to read full report and summary report. 

I’m Dr Rebecca O’Connor and I set up ROC Research Consultancy 5 years ago so that I could collaborate with great partners and help them use real life research to be even better at what they do.

I started my career as a physiotherapist and research was a huge part of my training and practice. I found that when people understood the research behind their conditions and treatment plans, they were much more likely to change their behaviour to help them get better. Many healthcare professionals take this approach but I often wondered why with all these great individuals working within them, organisations like the NHS find it so hard to change and improve on a larger scale.

To satisfy my growing curiosity, I took a sidestep from my physiotherapy career to undertake a PhD exploring how the NHS commissions services to enable it to provide high quality care through collaboration. My thesis ‘Where’s the logic in commissioning?’ developed a framework for understanding how individual, organisational and system behaviours can compliment each other, or how is often the case, fight against each other. Importantly, I’d also found a way to explain it in simpler terms that might actually help individuals and organisations to work together better and provide better services.

I thought long and hard about continuing down a traditional academic route. I really valued the academics I had the privilege of working with and the high quality research they publish. But I wanted to use what I’d learnt in the here and now, and help organisations grappling with the challenges they face, to understand the context they work in and use evidence from their own work to help them improve and grow.

ROC Research Consultancy was born in 2017 and since then I’ve worked with partners across the Midlands as an independent research partner. I’ll be sharing more about the approach I use as an embedded independent researcher on this page and look forward to hearing about your own experiences of working in this way.

In 2021, against the backdrop of the unprecedented challenges posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, ROC Research Consultancy was commissioned by Small Steps Big Changes to evaluate the journey of a virtual Community of Practice (CoP). The aim was to improve the system for people experiencing severe multiple disadvantage, deprivation, and health inequalities from birth to later in life in Nottingham. Change Nottingham pooled resources and enthusiasm, and an drew together a diverse range of partners for a series of virtual workshops to explore how to build a coordinated systemic approach to collaboration around this issue. Dr Rebecca O’Connor explored the implementation of the CoP from its inaugural meeting in February 2021 through to the fourth CoP in July 2021.

By embedding herself within the CoP planning group, Rebecca codesigned the evaluation approach with partners. With a purely qualitative approach, CoP planners and participants were interviewed throughout the evaluation period to collate multiple perspectives and understand the value of the CoP. Findings were fed back rapidly to the planning group to help inform decision making as the CoP progressed and evolved. Learning that emerged helped to clarify the purpose of the CoP and understand how to engage and maintain engagement. It highlighted the importance of building relationships and nurturing networks when encouraging collaborative working between different types of partners.

Evaluation played an important role in understanding the complexity of a CoP and allowed the voice of the participants to be added to the planning conversation. While this sometimes challenges the agenda of those involved in planning and facilitating a collaborative work stream, it has the potential to enhance engagement and collective ownership of collective systems thinking. If you are interested in learning more about an embedded evaluator approach, please contact Dr Rebecca O’Connor who will be very happy to discuss it with you further.