About health research

Everything your doctor, nurse or other health and care professional does to help you is based on evidence. Research builds evidence so they know what works best for you.

Health and care research being conducted today will support the services you and your family use in future.

How does research work?

All research begins with questions, before information is gathered, tested and analysed to provide answers.

Research can take weeks, months or years depending on the kind of questions being explored. Researchers must gather enough evidence to produce findings which can improve our health and care services.

Find out more about some research projects making a difference in our region on the How
data is improving health and services page.

What types of research are there?

There are many different types of health research. This includes but is not limited to:

• Fundamental discovery science – this aims to improve understanding of biological or other factors influencing human health. An example would be if a new medicine was being tested to understand the effect it can have and how controlled this is.
• Population-based study – this looks at the health of a large number of people across a certain period of time.
• Interventional study – this is where people may be randomised to test different interventions, such as one group testing a new medicine and another receiving a placebo.

Who carries out health research?

Health and care research can be carried out by different groups of people, either independently or working together.

• Health and care professionals / staff – health and care professionals design, carry out and support research projects all the time. Their clinical experience is invaluable for both wider research projects and also planning local services. This can sometimes be supported or led by analysts and other professionals working in the health and care sector.
• University academics – universities engage in research as part of their ongoing missions around learning and discovery. Their expertise and resources are key to advancing knowledge across society.
• Industry professionals – industry researchers may conduct research to check how effective a product or service they provide is, or how it can improve.
• Charity organisations – some charities with specialist interests can facilitate or conduct their own research to better improve the lives of people they campaign for.

How does the North West SDE help?

The North West SDE supports health and care research by providing faster, controlled access to de-identified health and social care data.

This means approved researchers have powerful data at their fingertips to support their studies, but there are strict measures in place to protect health and social care data at the same time.

Read more on our How data is protected page.

How can we support health and care research?

You are supporting health and care research without doing anything through the North West SDE.

Your de-identified data can be included in large data sets that can make difference to many different types of research.

If you want to get more involved in research, you can either:

• participate in studies
• represent the interests of the general in public involvement groups.

You can find out more on our Get involved in research and Patient Advisory and Accountability Group pages.

How data is improving health and services

Research is always transforming our health and care services.

• Read more on our About health research page.

We are lucky to have a thriving research community in the North West and this section of the website will showcase previous studies already making a difference.