the ask

Leicestershire County Council secured national funding to establish the Health Determinants Research Collaboration (HDRC) — a five-year programme designed to strengthen how research is generated and used within local government.

The programme focuses on the determinants of health — the wider factors that shape people’s health and wellbeing, such as housing, education, employment and the environment.

Although hosted by the council, the HDRC is a partnership between the council, local universities and local communities, working together to ensure research informs real-world policy and services.

The challenge was to develop an evaluation approach that could do more than report on activity — it needed to support organisational learning and help the partnership understand how research capability and evidence-informed decision-making were developing across the system.

what we did

• Co-designed a five-year evaluation framework — developed through one-to-one conversations and collaborative workshops with the HDRC Board and Public Advisory Group to build shared agreement on the partnership’s key learning questions.

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• Aligned learning with national requirements — establishing long-term evaluation questions that support both local insight and align to funder expectations around reporting.

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• Designed annual thematic deep dives — enabling the partnership to explore priority areas selected collectively each year.

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• Introduced Plan–Do–Study–Act learning cycles — each deep dive runs as a structured cycle to generate insight, agree actions and review progress, embedding reflection and adaptation into programme governance.

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• Built cross-system ownership of learning — bringing council leaders, academic partners and public contributors into shared decisions about what the programme should learn and how progress should be reviewed.

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I’m getting really quite excited about how far the Leicestershire HDRC has come in just a year.

– Public Advisory Group Member

what changed

Although the programme is still in its early years, several changes are already visible:

• A shared structure for learning established — the partnership now has a collectively owned approach to understanding progress across the programme.

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• Regular reflection embedded across the collaboration — Plan–Do–Study–Act cycles are helping partners review progress, explore complex questions and agree practical next steps together.

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• Foundations for long-term impact — over time, the evaluation will help the partnership understand how research capability develops within the council and how evidence increasingly informs policy and decision-making.

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The workshop at County Hall—where we all actively collaborated in taking stock of progress and future plans—was invigorating and exciting.

– Public Advisory Group Member