David J. Hunter
1, John Frank
2*1 Institute of Health and Society, Newcastle University, Newcastle, UK.
2 Usher Institute of Population Health Sciences and Informatics, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Abstract
We offer a UK-based commentary on the recent “Perspective” published in IJHPM by Thakkar and Sullivan.
We are sympathetic to the authors’ call for increased funding for health service and policy research (HSPR).
However, we point out that increasing that investment – in any of the three countries they compare: Canada,
the United States and the United Kingdom– will ipso facto not necessarily lead to any better use of research by
health system decision-makers in these settings. We cite previous authors’ descriptions of the many factors that
tend to make the worlds of researchers and decision-makers into “two solitudes.” And we call for changes in
the structure and funding of HSPR, particularly the incentives now in place for purely academic publishing, to
tackle a widespread reality: most published research in HSPR, as in other applied fields of science, is never read
or used by the vast majority of decision-makers, working out in the “real world.