Partnerships and engagement

Our partnerships and engagement

ScHARR has a long history of engagement and partnership with global, national and local stakeholders in the commercial, public and third party sectors. This includes undertaking consultancy work for a wide variety of organisations that contribute to ScHARR's impact on health care and the economy.

Over the years, we have sought to develop closer connections with lasting agreements and direct partnership arrangements. We currently have more than 20 master service agreements and partnerships with organisations across the sectors.

Case studies

Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) 

Preventing and Tackling Mental Ill Health through Green Social Prescribing Project Evaluation

Project period: 19 March 2021 - 26 March 2023

About: ScHARR was the lead bidder collaborating with colleagues in the Department of Landscape and the Health Sciences School. ScHARR led the consortium with recognised topic experts at Sheffield Hallam University and the Universities of Exeter and Plymouth.

Outputs, publications and further work: We are anticipating a number of high quality peer reviewed publications from this work in addition to other avenues of high impact dissemination. These include, publication as public facing documents on Government websites, case studies, toolkits and conference presentations.

Yorkshire Cancer Research (YCR)

QUIT Smoking Cessation Service Evaluation

Project period: 15 February 2021 - 31 December 2022

About: A team from ScHARR has been commissioned by Yorkshire Cancer Research to evaluate the QUIT programme. South Yorkshire and Bassetlaw Integrated Care System are implementing the QUIT programme and are a partner in the evaluation.

As a service evaluation, the questions asked by the evaluation are guided primarily by the information needs of the QUIT programme to inform its future running.

Outputs, publications and further work:

• Reports, peer-reviewed publications and other communication materials to communicate the evaluation findings and support local and national decision-making.
• The evaluation of the QUIT service is the largest national evaluation of its kind so far. We therefore expect it to have a substantial impact on decision-making.
• Ongoing engagement with local and NHS England stakeholders.

Department of Health and Social Care (previously: Public Health England)

Non-Communicable Disease Modelling Partnership - Technical Capacity Building

Project period: 1 November 2019 - 1 November 2022

About: ScHARR is one of the most influential centres in NCD modelling in the UK due to close alignment between our Health Economics and Decision Science and Public Health sections, together with our involvement in UK-wide academic networks and partnerships with national and local decision-making bodies.

This work will help understand future health challenges and inform decision-making about preventative interventions to effectively and equitably reduce NCDs at local and national levels.

Several current students are working on or developing NCD models. We have just received a new award worth over £5 million to train 35 new researchers who will be at the forefront of promoting public health economic modelling in the UK and beyond.

VIFOR Pharma

Development of the economic evaluation for difelikefalin that will subsequently be used for reimbursement and pricing purposes (1167)

Initial project period: 1 November 2019 - 31 October 2020

About: ScHARR worked with Vifor, experts in HTA, reimbursement and Clinical Nephrology to develop a conceptual health economic model, including information requirements, uncertainties and future value proposition studies.

As the team’s understanding of the disease area deepened, they became obvious continued collaborators with Vifor and, following proposal submission, were awarded multiple additional programmes of work.

Outputs, publications and further work:

• ScHARR was subsequently placed on a preferred provider list and an associated Master Service Agreements was authored between Vifor and ScHARR.
• Edith Poku, Sue Harnan, Gill Rooney, Marrissa Martyn-St James, Mónica Hernández-Alava, Thilo Schaufler, Praveen Thokala, James Fotheringham, The relationship between chronic kidney disease–associated pruritus and health-related quality of life: a systematic review, Clinical Kidney Journal, Volume 15, Issue 3, March 2022, Pages 484–499, https://doi.org/10.1093/ckj/sfab218
• Following the presentation of the project at ISPOR, Pharmacotherapeutics approached the team requesting that the health economic model from this work was submitted to them.

Genomics PLC

Conceptual modelling of different disease areas to undertake a trial to evaluate polygenic risk scores

Project period: Part 1 - 9 December 2021 - 29 April 2022, Part 2 - 29 April 2022 onwards

About: The aim of this work is to support Genomics PLC in identifying the existing pathways in the NHS for high-risk individuals and the optimal role of the interventions within these pathways.

This analysis consists of two parts. Part 1, conceptual modelling, will provide design recommendations for the modelling in Part 2, the development of quantified disease models, expected to run in parallel with primary research on the risk scoring system.

Outputs, publications and further work:

• ScHARR and Genomics PLC will discuss the opportunity to publish a peer-reviewed paper.
• ScHARR has a strong interest in submitting a publication as an output of the project. 

The Artificial Intelligence in Health and Care Award (framework) 

Framework period: April 2022 - April 2026

About: ScHARR and colleagues from the Information School, Computer Science and Psychology have been successful with a collaborative submission for the ‘Artificial Intelligence in Health and Care Award (AI Award)’ run by the Accelerated Access Collaborative (AAC) in partnership with NHSX and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR).

It will make £140 million available over four years to accelerate the testing and evaluation of the most promising AI technologies which meet the strategic aims set out in the NHS Long Term Plan.

Our partners

Some of our partners include: