Our research covers six key themes involved in improving children’s outcomes, ranging from educational wellbeing to mental wellbeing and beyond. We conduct research on who accesses interventions, whether they work, and if the interventions are good ‘value for money’.
How do we determine whether interventions work?
Implementation Evaluations
We provide support, data and insights to intervention providers about who they are reaching, how they reach them, and what families take part in their services. We work directly with providers to help them become self-sufficient in data collection and reporting. We aim to strengthen their existing services and help them provide better evidence for the work that they do.
Click on a theme below to find out more.
Enhanced Evaluations
We conduct evaluations of specific interventions that reach a large number of families and have sufficient data quality. We use both standard and applied health research methods to do this, and use data from the BiBBS birth cohort to support evaluation. These are formal tests of whether an intervention brings a benefit to health outcomes for families. This work enables us to evaluate the evidence-base for interventions, and provide insight into whether they can be expanded to other areas beyond Bradford. We also test if they are economically viable, i.e. good value for money, using economic evaluations.
Click on a theme below to find out more.
Our research themes:
Targeting a vital foundation for improving life chances
Focussing on the building blocks of a better start in life
Promoting a healthy lifestyle right from the start
Supporting families to access local parks and green spaces
Working with the community to make change
Tracking and tackling the impacts of a global pandemic
How do we know if interventions have economic value?
We work with economists from the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration: Yorkshire and Humber team (ARC-YH) to work out how much interventions cost, as well as whether interventions bring worthwhile health and wellbeing benefits. We do this by understanding what is needed to deliver the interventions, how they might reduce the care that people need (for example, an intervention might reduce the number of times children see their GP), and whether people are likely to see a long-term change in their health and wellbeing.
Whenever the interventions we evaluate have an enhanced evaluation (i.e. a formal assessment of if the intervention has a benefit to children and families’ health outcomes), we run an economic evaluation. You can find out more about these specific evaluations by clicking on a theme that interests you above.
If you are interested in learning more about economic evaluation, we have also developed an online toolkit to guide you through some of the key ideas – just click on the button opposite.
Economic evaluation information written by Sebastian Hinde
the Better Start Bradford Innovation Hub 
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