STEPS Centre research: our approach to impact

The ‘impact’ of research has seen a dramatic rise up the UK’s policy agenda in recent years. But what does ‘impact’ really mean? How do researchers and others respond to the new ‘impact agenda’ and how might we best plan, monitor and report on impact? This working paper attempts to provide answers to some of these questions by reviewing various understandings of ‘impact’ and describing the approach used by the ESRC STEPS Centre in its second five-year phase of funding. In particular, we draw on our experience of adapting and employing a down-scaled version of ‘participatory impact pathways analysis’ (PIPA) and reflect on its utility and potential as a tool for planning relatively small-scale social science/ interdisciplinary research projects conducted with partners in developing countries. In using PIPA, the STEPS Centre has adapted the idea of ‘impact pathways’ in line with its broader ‘pathways approach’, which focusses on complex and dynamic interactions between knowledge, politics and ‘social, technological and environmental pathways to sustainability’. In this way, PIPA has been useful in articulating and exploring the potential impact of STEPS Centre projects: it has helped to map out the networks known to the researchers, appreciate different perspectives held by the team members and generate an understanding of the narratives, networks and policy processes under study. Although the possibility for detailed ex ante prediction of impact pathways is limited, using PIPA has helped teams to be ready to maximise communication and engagement opportunities, and to link research across different STEPS Centre projects and beyond. The working paper also describes how PIPA may be used iteratively in a way that enables reflexive learning amongst research teams. Lastly, we speculate on the ways in which PIPA may be further developed and used in ex post impact monitoring and evaluation into the future

Safer clinical systems : interim report, August 2010

Safer Clinical Systems is the Health Foundation’s new five year programme of work to test and demonstrate ways to improve healthcare systems and processes, to develop safer systems that improve patient safety. It builds on learning from the Safer Patients Initiative (SPI) and models of system improvement from both healthcare and other industries. Learning from the SPI highlighted the need to take a clinical systems approach to improving safety. SPI highlighted that many hospitals struggle to implement improvement in clinical areas due to inherent problems with support mechanisms. Clinical processes and systems, rather than individuals, are often the contributors to breakdown in patient safety. The Safer Clinical Systems programme aimed to measure the reliability of clinical processes, identify defects within those processes, and identify the systems that result in those defects. Methods to improve system reliability were then to be tested and re-developed in order to reduce the risk of harm being caused to patients. Such system-level awareness should lead to improvements in other patient care pathways. The relationship between system reliability and actual harm is challenging to identify and measure. Specific, well-defined, small-scale processes have been used in other programmes, and system reliability has been shown to have a direct causal relationship with harm (e.g. care bundle compliance in an intensive care unit can reduce the incidence of ventilator-associated pneumonia). However, it has become evident that harm can be caused by a variety of factors over time; when working in broader, more complex and dynamic systems, change in outcome can be difficult to attribute to specific improvements and difficulties are also associated with relating evidence to resulting harm. The overall aim of Phase 1 of the Safer Clinical Systems programme was to demonstrate proof-of-concept that using a systems-based approach could contribute to improved patient safety. In Phase 1, experienced NHS teams from four locations worked together with expert advisers to co-design the Safer Clinical Systems programme

Using environmental reporting tools in the supply chain : perspectives from UK, Finland and Thailand

Paper delivered at the 21st Logistics Research Network annual conference 2016, 7th-9th September 2016, Hull. Abstract Purpose: Supply chain performance measures and reporting tools must evolve as new societal challenges are met, and the natural environment has become one of today’s most significant challenges. An inter-disciplinary interest in the field of environmental supply chain management has grown amongst researchers and practitioners in recent years as a potential source of competitive advantage due to climate change issues, diminishing raw materials, excess waste, and increasing levels of pollution. Measurement of environmental performance has also developed as a related topic and environmental management systems (EMS) within a logistics context have garnered some attention in the literature. However, little work has been done to assess the use of appropriate environmental reporting tools or the adoption of extant standards such as ISO14001 or EMAS in which to position and report environmental performance measures in the logistics sector. This paper builds on work presented by Shenin and Grant at the 2015 LRN conference to compare and contrast the adoption and use of environmental reporting tools in the UK, Finnish and Thai logistics sectors and identify key drivers and barriers. Research Approach: This is a new area of research and thus exploratory tools were used to collect data from different perspectives. The study used a combination of semi-structured interviews, focus groups and two large scale industry surveys. Findings and originality: The study found that the two most commonly known EMS are ISO 14001 and EMAS. However, they have been inconsistently adopted across the various sectors. For example, many UK logistics practitioners have developed their ‘own company designed’ reporting tools. Further, logistics and supply chain practitioners in all countries indicated a lack of understanding of environmental management systems (EMS), with small firms demonstrating no reporting at all. Key drivers and benefits for adoption of reporting tools were financially linked to customer requirements, to reduce waste and be more operationally efficient. Additionally, a lack of standard ESCPM reporting and measurement tools and government direction, and the complexity of the supply chain were seen as key barriers to effective implementation. Research Impact: Reporting tools widely discussed in the academic literature such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Green SCOR were not found to be extensively used in the three logistics sectors. There appears to be ‘no one size fits all’ tool in current environmental supply chain reporting and thus a clear divergence between theory and practice

Using environmental reporting tools in the supply chain : perspectives from UK, Finland and Thailand

Paper delivered at the 21st Logistics Research Network annual conference 2016, 7th-9th September 2016, Hull. Abstract Purpose: Supply chain performance measures and reporting tools must evolve as new societal challenges are met, and the natural environment has become one of today’s most significant challenges. An inter-disciplinary interest in the field of environmental supply chain management has grown amongst researchers and practitioners in recent years as a potential source of competitive advantage due to climate change issues, diminishing raw materials, excess waste, and increasing levels of pollution. Measurement of environmental performance has also developed as a related topic and environmental management systems (EMS) within a logistics context have garnered some attention in the literature. However, little work has been done to assess the use of appropriate environmental reporting tools or the adoption of extant standards such as ISO14001 or EMAS in which to position and report environmental performance measures in the logistics sector. This paper builds on work presented by Shenin and Grant at the 2015 LRN conference to compare and contrast the adoption and use of environmental reporting tools in the UK, Finnish and Thai logistics sectors and identify key drivers and barriers. Research Approach: This is a new area of research and thus exploratory tools were used to collect data from different perspectives. The study used a combination of semi-structured interviews, focus groups and two large scale industry surveys. Findings and originality: The study found that the two most commonly known EMS are ISO 14001 and EMAS. However, they have been inconsistently adopted across the various sectors. For example, many UK logistics practitioners have developed their ‘own company designed’ reporting tools. Further, logistics and supply chain practitioners in all countries indicated a lack of understanding of environmental management systems (EMS), with small firms demonstrating no reporting at all. Key drivers and benefits for adoption of reporting tools were financially linked to customer requirements, to reduce waste and be more operationally efficient. Additionally, a lack of standard ESCPM reporting and measurement tools and government direction, and the complexity of the supply chain were seen as key barriers to effective implementation. Research Impact: Reporting tools widely discussed in the academic literature such as the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), Balanced Scorecard (BSC) and Green SCOR were not found to be extensively used in the three logistics sectors. There appears to be ‘no one size fits all’ tool in current environmental supply chain reporting and thus a clear divergence between theory and practice

Integrating big data into a sustainable mobility policy 2.0 planning support system

It is estimated that each of us, on a daily basis, produces a bit more than 1 GB of digital content through our mobile phone and social networks activities, bank card payments, location-based positioning information, online activities, etc. However, the implementation of these large data amounts in city assets planning systems still remains a rather abstract idea for several reasons, including the fact that practical examples are still very strongly services-oriented, and are a largely unexplored and interdisciplinary field; hence, missing the cross-cutting dimension. In this paper, we describe the Policy 2.0 concept and integrate user generated content into Policy 2.0 platform for sustainable mobility planning. By means of a real-life example, we demonstrate the applicability of such a big data integration approach to smart cities planning process. Observed benefits range from improved timeliness of the data and reduced duration of the planning cycle to more informed and agile decision making, on both the citizens and the city planners end. The integration of big data into the planning process, at this stage, does not have uniform impact across all levels of decision making and planning process, therefore it should be performed gradually and with full awareness of existing limitations

A Framework for Tracking the Impacts of the Affordable Care Act in California

Recommends measures for monitoring the impact of healthcare reform on insurance coverage, affordability and comprehensiveness of coverage, and access to care; the best data source for each measure; gaps in existing data; and issues for data presentation

Comparative Analysis of Web of Science and Scopus on the Energy Efficiency and Climate Impact of Buildings

Although the body of scientific publications on energy efficiency and climate mitigation from buildings has been growing quickly in recent years, very few previous bibliometric analysis studies exist that analyze the literature in terms of specific content (trends or options for zero‐energy buildings) or coverage of different scientific databases. We evaluate the scientific literature published since January 2013 concerning alternative methods for improving the energy efficiency and mitigating climate impacts from buildings. We quantify and describe the literature through a bibliometric approach, comparing the databases Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. A total of 19,416 (Scopus) and 17,468 (WoS) publications are analyzed, with only 11% common documents. The literature has grown steadily during this time period, with a peak in the year 2017. Most of the publications are in English, in the area of Engineering and Energy Fuels, and from institutions from China and the USA. Strong links are observed between the most published authors and institutions worldwide. An analysis of keywords reveals that most of research focuses on technologies for heating, ventilation, and air‐conditioning, phase change materials, as well as information and communication technologies. A significantly smaller segment of the literature takes a broader perspective (greenhouse gas emissions, life cycle, and sustainable development), investigating implementation issues (policies and costs) or renewable energy (solar). Knowledge gaps are detected in the areas of behavioral changes, the circular economy, and some renewable energy sources (geothermal, biomass, small wind). We conclude that i) the contents of WoS and Scopus are radically different in the studied fields; ii) research seems to focus on technological aspects; and iii) there are weak links between research on energy and on climate mitigation and sustainability, the latter themes being misrepresented in the literature. These conclusions should be validated with further analyses of the documents identified in this study. We recommend that future research focuses on filling the above identified gaps, assessing the contents of several scientific databases, and extending energy analyses to their effects in terms of mitigation potentials.This work was funded by the Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades de España (RTI2018‐ 093849‐B‐C31), by ICREA under the ICREA Academia programme, and by the foundation SIVL