A case study on determining and responding to health managers' priorities for research to assist health service decision making

The Newcastle Institute of Public Health (NIPH) is a collaboration of health service and public health research groups in the Hunter Region of New South Wales, Australia which aims to promote the use of evidence in decision making. However, use of research evidence in decision making is a complex process, with many barriers and enablers described in the literature. Informed by strategies described in the literature around developing priority-driven research, NIPH researchers undertook to determine whether asking local health decision-makers about their needs for research information might lead to greater use of the resulting research evidence to inform health service management decisions. This paper describes a process used by NIPH to determine the research needs of 11 local senior health managers, our response to specific research questions, the communication of this research information, and the outcome