RAE 2008
The Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) is conducted jointly by the Higher Education Funding Council for England, the Scottish Funding Council, the Higher Education Funding Council for Wales and the Department for Employment and Learning, Northern Ireland.
For RAE 2008, the Institute of Health & Society submitted to the following unit(s) of assessment:
The Institute of Health & Society conducts research across two broad areas of science:
- Health services research
- Epidemiology and public health
The Institute has 55 academic staff working across these two scientific areas, with research income totalling £30M since 2001.
Health Services Research is organised around two themes:
Implementation, effectiveness and efficiency in health care - focusing on understanding the impacts, effectiveness and efficiency of health technologies and services, and the dynamics of professional and patient behaviours.
Lifecourse and quality of life - focusing on understanding the distribution and effects of childhood disability, and the impact and experience of dementia and other health problems for older people.
Epidemiology and Public Health (EPH) research is organised around four interrelated themes:
Chronic Disease and Lifecourse Epidemiology - with focuses on diabetes and cardiovascular disease, low and middle income countries, and influences across the lifecourse, including inequalities in health.
Environmental Epidemiology - with focuses on industrial air pollution, and land contaminants and health.
Fetal, Perinatal and Childhood Epidemiology - with focuses on stillbirths, congenital abnormalities, failure to thrive and childhood cancers.
Public Health Interventions - with an emphasis on systematic, theory-driven and evidence-based development and evaluation of complex interventions, and focuses on health related behaviour change and tackling health inequalities.
These research themes are prosecuted through 11 research programmes. Through all of these themes runs a cross-cutting programme of work on trials and methods based in the Newcastle Clinical Trials Unit. The Trials Unit provides the fulcrum for collaboration with clinical scientists from around the University. The Institute itself has particular clinical strengths in oral health and communication and language science. Methods and theories from the social sciences are central to our work, and the Institute includes groups of researchers in sociology and economics from the School of Geography, Politics and Sociology and the Newcastle University Business School.
