Identifying Issues and Uncertainties

PenCLAHRC 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. We consider all ideas and prioritise those to develop further, using a stakeholder group representing all our partners.

We anticipate the process will generate more questions than can be addressed and therefore 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.

Alternatively, you can submit a question to us directly using the web tool accessed below. Our web tool is always open and questions can be submitted at any time of the year, although we do have a timetable in place for the prioritisation process.

Ready to ask a research question?

You can submit a question by accessing our online question submission form web tool:

Web Tool

Detailed guidance on how to complete the question submission form is provided in the web tool but you will be asked for the following information:

Details about yourself (e.g. name, email address, location)
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 will then be asked to summarise your question in a brief statement and whether you are happy for your question to be shared with other relevant organisations.

You will be able to view example questions and also make changes to your question as you proceed through the tool. Please email us if you have any issues or problems with this.

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