The Health of People: How the social sciences can improve population health by Campaign for Social Science

Author:Campaign for Social Science, [Campaign for Social Science,]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2017-04-03T16:00:00+00:00

Social Science and Dat a

Policy organisations, such as the King’s Fund, and research funders, such as the Wellcome Trust, the Health Foundation, the ESRC and MRC, along with health professionals and clinical and social scientists have been increasingly vocal in calling attention to the need for more strategic understanding of health – how outcomes relate both to the health services and to wider social and environmental factors – and have pointed out that this requires making better use of data.127 So too have the Department of Health, NHS England and the Local Government Association, among others.128

For much social and healthcare research, data are analogous to the scientist’s laboratory. This is recognised in initiatives such as the Health Foundation’s research programme on health informatics, which funds projects and capacity to improve use of all sorts of routine data to improve healthcare.129 The Academy of Medical Sciences report, Improving the Health of the Public by 2040 , also draws attention to the need for better use of data, and the need to build the capacity of researchers from all disciplines to use those data.130

So while the issue of data underpins much of the substantive discussion in this report, it is important enough as an issue in its own right to warrant a separate discussion.

As we have argued above, appreciation that examining variations in healthcare can provide valuable insight has widened the drive to consider how routine health and administrative data can be a pathway to improving medical care. (The Dartmouth Institute in the US was one of the first research institutions to recognise this systematically.131 ) For instance, in its 2015 report, Better Value in the NHS , the King’s Fund examined a range of ways that better value (with better outcomes and less spending) had been achieved by the NHS over a number of years, and pointed out that in one important area there was still much to be done. Writing about variations in care, the report says:

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