Kickstarting policy impact

Over the last few years, Quality-Related Policy Support Funds (QR-PSF) have been the most important funding mechanism supporting academics across the UK to engage with policy audiences about their research. At Nottingham, we have been able to support a wide range of projects at all stages of the policy engagement process from conception and capacity building through to implementation.

Here, we take a look at some of the diverse projects we’ve funded over the last few years and explore some of the factors behind their success. 

What makes a good project and what type of approaches are included?

Local impact: nutritional insecurity in Nottinghamshire

Food security is declining nationally, especially among the poorest communities. Tackling this often falls to local authorities, but they often lack detailed local data on which to build targeted policies.

Simon Welham (Biosciences) and his team had built evidence about the state of food insecurity during Covid and the nutritional impact of food insecurity on those living in poverty. Simon used QR-PSF funding for follow-up work focused on Nottinghamshire, identifying the extent of food insecurity across the county and specific drivers beyond simply income level. The team further generated high resolution mapped data to indicate principal local needs/challenges/ nutritional deficits along with detailed assessments of the nutritional value of specified council supported provision.

Simon’s data was incorporated into the Nottinghamshire County Council’s Joint Strategic Needs Assessment for food security locally (Notts. JSNA 2024) and has been communicated to city council public health, financial resilience and procurement officials, alongside representatives from local food providers. Simon is currently working to share the broader findings with county councillors and representatives from the county public health team.

What made this a successful PSF project? The team had a very clear focus in terms of the policy audience, and identified a clear gap in terms of the knowledge their audience needed to make policy decisions. By working with stakeholders, they were able to identify a concrete point of engagement with the policy making process and target their work at specific objectives.

National impact: helping reduce the health impacts of falls

Elizabeth Orton (Medicine) specialises in injury epidemiology, and her work has led to two interventions helping to reduce the health impacts of falls: the Falls Management Exercise (FaME) programme focusing on older people, and the Stay One Step Ahead (SOSA) intervention focusing on children. Using PSF funding, Elizabeth aimed to raise awareness of these programmes and their valuable public health insights, and support policy makers to understand their benefits and implement them more widely. She worked with partners to develop a policy brief and a delivery model, enabling her to present detailed proposals to NHS decision makers.

PSF funding enabled Elizabeth to conduct an extensive analysis of national governmental, NHS and third sector policy documents in order to understand where the gaps were, where falls needed to be prioritised more, and where her policy outputs could be most beneficial. This will enable her to prioritise resources more effectively as she continues her policy impact work. She has also used the insights generated through her policy work to update and improve the practitioner toolkits she has developed for the FaME programme.

Elizabeth’s work to understand, map and strategise for the policy landscape has supported her to partner with the Child Accident Prevention Trust (CAPT) to plan for pilot the implementation of the SOSA Programme. This involves helping the trust to attempt to secure additional funding, identify potential implementation locations and partners and develop a training model for local provision.

What made this a successful PSF project? Elizabeth’s approach to her policy work is very strongly rooted in partnership, with a clear understanding of how a policy-focused approach could support her and her partners to move from insight to action. In particular, by supporting Elizabeth to develop a detailed understanding of the policy landscape, PSF funding enabled her to move into this terrain with greater confidence and clearer objectives.