A key element of DECIPHer’s methods research programme over
2020-2025 has been our short courses providing training on methods for public health intervention science. As we gear up for this year’s sessions, Course Lead Dr Rachel Brown discusses the highlights.
Each year, we deliver a summer course that covers an introduction to a variety of methods and principles, followed by individual courses on particular methods. We deliver bespoke versions of these courses to groups across the UK and internationally.
2020 -2025 included delivery challenges presented by Covid-19 and the switch to online provision. In January 2021, DECIPHer co-investigator Dr Jeremy Segrott and our public involvement officer Peter Gee delivered an online training course, in collaboration with Health and Care Research Wales, on involving young people in research. Our five-day course was delivered online in June 2021 and, despite this change, the course was oversubscribed within a week of opening registrations. Likewise, our one-day process evaluation course was also moved online and oversubscribed with UK and international delegates.
From 2022, we reinstated some in-person delivery, combined with online and hybrid courses. Our summer course delivered two, two-day workshops, supported by prerecorded offline sessions. This allowed coverage of a wider variety of topics consistent with previous offerings whilst avoiding multiple days of screen time. The full course returned to in-person delivery in 2023-24, hosted in DECIPHer’s new location, Cardiff University’s Social Science Research Park (SPARK). Attendees were national and international and included five members of Health and Care Research Wales faculty.
These courses are a key way to diffuse our methodological innovations to other national and international contexts.
Our one-day course on process evaluation returned in-person in 2022, alongside a new one-day course based on DECIPHer’s MRCNIHR funded methodological guidance on Adapting Interventions to New Contexts (ADAPT). Since 2023, our September programme has consisted of three courses on Feasibility Studies, Process Evaluation and Adapting Interventions to New Contexts. These courses are a key way to diffuse our methodological innovations to other national and international contexts.
Requests for bespoke course delivery continue to grow. In 2022 our process evaluation course was delivered to the Department for Environment Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) on request. In May 2023, we delivered a three-day in-person course to staff at Ulster University in Belfast, focused on introducing methods for developing and evaluating complex interventions. In 2023/24 we delivered a two-part course to academic and clinical researchers from Oxford Brookes University’s Institute of Applied Health Research (OxInAHR) and Oxford University Hospital Trust. The course covered most elements of our Cardiff summer course and received very positive feedback.
Internationally, the programme continues to grow. In 2020, DECIPHer co-investigators Dr Jemma Hawkins and Prof Graham Moore led an online accredited doctoral training course on developing and evaluating complex interventions for PhD students at Karolinska Institute (KI) in Sweden. The course attracted students from KI itself, as well as students from elsewhere in Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands and Tanzania.
The course has run every year since, now as a three-week accredited doctoral training course, with Dr Rachel Brown recently joining the teaching team. This collaboration also led to successful external funding grants involving Dr Jemma Hawkins as a collaborator.
In 2020, Prof Rhiannon Evans and Dr Rachel Brown delivered an adapted online version of the Process Evaluation course to 15 researchers and doctoral students at Aalborg University, Denmark. This has continued to run every year since. As a result of this, two DECIPHer staff members contributed a chapter to the Public Health Handbook for undergraduate and postgraduate degrees across Denmark.
We have delivered international bespoke courses, including to staff at Monash University Central Clinical School in Australia, and academics from Canterbury Christ Church University and their collaborators from four Universities in Palestine as part of a Global Challenges Research Fund (GCRF) collaboration. We have also delivered bespoke sessions from our courses in a variety of international contexts, including Namibia, Austria, Finland, Moldova, North Macedonia, Spain and Germany.
More information about our short courses can be found here. This article is taken from our 2020 – 2025 Annual Report, which can be read here: 2020-2025 End of Award Report.