Identifying Issues and Uncertainties

PenARC is committed to working with healthcare professionals and the public to identify areas of research that reflect the real needs and concerns of the health service in the South West.

We are interested in hearing ideas from healthcare professionals and people using the health service across the region, which could be developed into research projects.

PenCLAHRC has previously run a research prioritisation process, which considered all ideas submitted to us and prioritised a small number to develop further, using a stakeholder group representing all our partners.

This process generates more questions than can be addressed and therefore we use an explicit prioritisation system based on:

The size of the health problem
The potential for health improvement
The practicality of the research question
Whether the South West is a good place to do this research
Alignment with regional healthcare priorities

We can offer help and advice to develop your issue or idea into a research question. For more information please contact us via email.

We also offer support through our Making Sense of Evidence programme. Offering half-day or full-day workshops, this programme aims to help develop skills in how to access and use research evidence to inform clinical practice and health care.

**Please note: Due to the end of the CLAHRC grant in September 2019 and the launch of the ARC programme in October 2019, we are not currently running the Question Prioritisation process. We will continue to review questions submitted to PenARC to assess whether they can be supported and share questions with colleagues at the NIHR Evaluation, Trials and Studies Coordinating Centre. Please contact us with any questions.**

Ready to ask a research question?

Research questions require the following information:

The general topic of your question and why it's important
The population or group that you are interested in
The intervention or method that you think should be used
The control or comparison group for your study population
The anticipated outcome from the research, i.e. what you hope to achieve or what you think will happen

You can find out more about the prioritisation process and what happens once a question is submitted on our 'What Happens Next?' page.