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5th UK Implementation Science Research Conference

  • Programme
  • Plenary Lectures
  • Scientific Committee
  • Meet the experts
  • Organisation Team
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  • Programme
  • Plenary Lectures
  • Scientific Committee
  • Meet the experts
  • Organisation Team

Plenary Lectures

Plenary Lecture 1

Implementing evidence into policy and practice: was there a gap in the science informing the UK’s Covid-19 response?

Professor Susan Michie

Professor of Health Psychology and Director of the Centre for Behaviour Change, University College London

Susan is a member of the UK’s Covid-19 Behavioural Science Advisory Group and the Scientific Pandemic Influenza Group on Behaviours, a sub-group of the Government’s Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). She also sits on the Independent SAGE committee, and frequently contributes to national media. 

Responding well to a pandemic requires rapid access to good evidence from a wide variety of scientific disciplines, including epidemiology, modelling, virology, medicine, public health and the behavioural and social sciences. It also requires effective translation of that evidence into policy and practice. During the Covid-19 pandemic, a large and complex infrastructure was created to enable scientists to inform the UK Government’s response: the Scientific Advisory Group in Emergencies (SAGE). Its lack of transparency at the beginning of the pandemic resulted in a former UK Government Chief Scientific Advisor creating a complementary body of scientists to provide scientific advice directly and transparently to the public, organisations and media: Independent SAGE.

The UK Government’s response to Covid-19 has been widely viewed as less than satisfactory. Did this reflect limitations in the nature of the scientific evidence provided, its translation through the science-policy pipeline or political will? Was there a hole in the science informing the process (namely, Implementation Science)? As a participant in both SAGE and Independent SAGE, I will address these questions in this talk.

Plenary Lecture 2

The impact of race and ethnicity on people’s health: learning from the Covid-19 pandemic and beyond

Dr Habib Naqvi

Director of the NHS Race and Health Observatory

The NHS Race and Health Observatory leads work nationally on identifying and tackling ethnic health inequalities. Habib joined the NHS in 2001, managing large public health research programmes in the south-west of England.

Plenary lecture 3

Delivery of primary health services in low- and middle-income countries during Covid-19

Rohina Joshi

Associate Professor George Institute for Global Health, Australia

Rohina holds an honorary appointment at the Sydney Medical School, University of Sydney. Rohina is a public health physician who works on developing low-cost healthcare models for chronic disease management in resource-limited settings. Read about Rohina’s research

Primary health care is vital to maintain the continuity of service delivery for routine care. Covid-19 has impacted primary health care globally and many countries have experienced significant disruptions in essential services, including immunisations, maternal and child health services, and screening for chronic conditions, such as cancer. Primary health care in many countries has been agile and adapted to the circumstances by implementing innovative methods to provide essential services. However, Covid-19 has revealed deficiencies and highlighted inequities in service delivery. In this session, I will showcase how primary health care services were delivered during Covid-19 using examples from India, Mexico and South Africa.

Plenary Lecture 4

Implementation fidelity: Loyalty to process implementation or loyalty to patient wellbeing, health equity and race?

Barbara Gray

CEO Urban Dandelion CIC, Lewisham Mayor and Council Advisor on BAME Health Inequalities

Barbara is the founder and CEO of Urban Dandelion CIC, a social enterprise specialising in community and neighbourhood regeneration. She is also the health inequalities advisor to the Mayor and Council of Lewisham, where she advises on addressing inequalities in population health in the south-east London borough.

Implementation Fidelity (IF) refers to the degree to which a programme or intervention is delivered as intended, with the assumption they will be implemented exactly as they are planned. For many reasons, this may not be the case?

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to require massive public health responses from national and local governments, and whilst they followed with scrupulous precision the processes for interventions such as communication, social distancing, hand-washing, personal protective equipment (PPE), testing and vaccination, there was no evidence base or process that took real account of the Equalities Act 2020 protected characteristics and the potential impact for these groups of people, nor the characteristics and features of UK’s urban population health.

Implementation Fidelity and Evidence Based Practice are key terms for implementation research and in my plenary presentation I will question whether loyalty to this process as it is, is in the right place and explore what’s missing

Plenary Lecture 5

Crisis? What crisis? Implementation science research in a global pandemic

Professor Trish Greenhalgh

Professor of Primary Care Health Sciences and Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford

Trish is an internationally recognised academic in primary health care, who trained as a GP. Early in the pandemic, Trish played a leading role in arguing for the precautionary wearing of face masks, when this was not yet public health policy in the UK (read more about Trish’s Covid research).

According to Boin et al, a crisis—whether political, environmental, financial or (in this case) public health—has three defining features: uncertainty, urgency and threat. In this lecture, I will consider how these features shaped and constrained the response of implementation science to the Covid-19 pandemic. Using illustrative examples of major service innovations implemented at pace and scale in the early months of the pandemic, my theoretical focus will be three themes that have long interested implementation science researchers. First, the challenge of “spread and scale-up” (that is, moving from a promising innovation that has been shown to “work” in a small demonstration study to a new way of working that becomes business-as-usual – i.e. acceptable, affordable, feasible and the expected way of working – across the board). Second, the challenge of balancing standardisation (where everyone implements the same innovation) and local embedding (in which technological solutions, policy directives or national guidelines must be flexed and negotiated to accommodate the different contingencies and path-dependencies of different settings). Third, the tension highlighted by Robey and Boudreau between two different logics: on the one hand, the logic of determinism – a conceptual orientation whose roots are in the hard sciences and which is innovation-centred, causal and more or less linear (as in “the impact of innovation X on outcome Y”), with context viewed as an external milieu of mediating and moderating variables; and on the other hand, the logic of opposition – an orientation whose roots lie in the critical social sciences, which eschews the search for linear, cause-and-effect relationships between variables and instead views reality as fluid, dynamic and containing inherent and unresolvable tensions, some of which inevitably generate conflict. The lecture will conclude with some suggestions for preparing for the next crisis.