It was through listening to women and analysing their stories that Oakley distinguished gender, the social expectations of men and women, from the biological differences of sex (Oakley, 1972), and explored the practical implications for women’s lives in their homes and in wider society (Oakley, 1974). Her focus on women’s lives, and her egalitarian approach to listening to what they had to say, earned her a reputation as a ‘feminist’ social scientist (Crow, 2020; Platt, 2007). This less hierarchical approach, being more conversational, sharing and inviting intimacy, now features prominently in feminist research (McHugh, 2014). Conversely, she interprets conventional social science as adopting a ‘masculine’ paradigm (Oakley, 1981: 32).

Her interest in childbirth drew on her experience of personal, academic and advocacy spaces to write a history of the medical care of pregnant women (Oakley, 2016). From listening to professionals (predominantly men) who provided, indeed designed, clinical care for pregnant women, her history, The Captured Womb, documented the medicalisation of childbirth, the dominance of male obstetricians, and the inadequacy of existing research to justify the procedures they recommended (Oakley, 1984).

While writing this history, she joined a World Health Organization (WHO) Perinatal Study Group, which had 15 core members from 10 countries and several disciplines. Thinking differently from the epidemiologists and obstetricians, she brought a sociological lens to focus on ‘the “socials” – the sociological perspective, social factors and social support’ leading to the proposition that reducing mothers’ stress through social forms of care may have measurable medical benefit (Oakley, 2016: 697). At the time, all the research reports available found no ill effects of social support, but measurable desired benefits remained elusive (Elbourne et al., 1989).

Alongside her interest in childbirth, Oakley applied a gender lens to violence. She drew attention to policy and mass media reports of violence that all but ignored that the perpetrators of violence are overwhelmingly men, and the victims are overwhelmingly women (Cockburn and Oakley, 2013a, 2014). In characteristically thorough fashion, she analysed the painful personal responses, the deeply hidden data on gender, the costs in terms of lives and economics, and the roots of violence in the structures of our patriarchal society (Oakley, 2002a; Cockburn and Oakley, 2013b; Scott-Samuel et al., 2015).

Women’s experiences of childbirth and violence in the home are both topics that SSRU has subsequently addressed, with several evaluations of efforts to reduce ill health, injury and death.

After seeing the discrepancies between women’s narratives about childbirth and the sparse research about their care at that time, Oakley set about evaluating the effects of social interventions required by designing studies differently. Just as SSRU was established, Oakley published an innovative study with a design taken from medical science and applied to social science, while adding qualitative to the conventional quantitative research methods. It was a randomised controlled trial, not of a medical treatment, but of social support from midwives for pregnant women with a history of babies with low birth weight (Oakley et al., 1990). The conversations between mother and midwife were both the social support intervention and the qualitative interview for data collection. The midwife was both service provider and researcher. The qualitative research integrated into a randomised controlled trial revealed that what women with a ‘high-risk’ pregnancy needed most was ‘more reassurance and information, recognition of the economic hardships that can be caused, and more attention to their feelings and opinions’ (Rajan and Oakley, 1990: 73), and that women offered a listening ear subsequently needed less healthcare and experienced better health, as did their babies (Oakley et al., 1990). A study spanning similar boundaries replicated the social support for disadvantaged women with new babies, with the midwives replaced by health visitors (Wiggins et al., 2004). Subsequent randomised controlled trials integrated both process and economic evaluations (Christie et al., 2014; Wiggins et al., 2020).

Against considerable resistance to this methodology (Oakley, 2006), SSRU employed it to evaluate educational interventions in schools (Oakley et al., 2004; Stephenson et al., 2004; Bonell et al., 2018; Jerrim et al., 2017). Throughout this portfolio of experimental evaluation, emphasis was on both randomly allocating participants to different conditions (Oakley et al., 2003) and evaluating the pathways through which change happened, or did not (Oakley et al., 2006).

Now, after more research, including from Oakley herself, we have evidence of social interventions offering measurable medical benefit. Programmes offering additional social support during pregnancy may help reduce antenatal hospital admissions and caesarean births, but not prevent babies being born too soon or too small (East et al., 2019).

Oakley’s first experience of systematically reviewing research literatures was of methods typically applied in the 1980s to aggregate the findings of studies addressing the effects of similar interventions – meta-analyses of randomised controlled trials (Elbourne et al., 1989) – the forerunner to the review cited above (East et al., 2019).

The following decade, she secured funding to take the methods that had been developed for synthesising research in clinical settings and adapt them for synthesising research conducted in community settings. She built a team whose work revealed a dearth of studies offering rigorous assessments of causal relationships (Peersman et al., 1999). Undeterred by literatures that could not support conclusions about effectiveness, the Department of Health encouraged the review team to ask other questions of the literature that could inform their policies: how interventions worked, or not (Harden et al., 2001), and what factors influenced health behaviours (Oliver et al., 2005). This began a journey that changed systematic reviews from looking for controlled trials that assess the effects of healthcare to looking for a broader range of studies to answer a broader range of questions using methods that are ‘fit for purpose’ (Gough et al., 2012b).

The EPPI-Centre team has adapted synthesis methods to suit policy problems in the fields of public health, social policy, global health systems, development studies, criminology, humanitarian aid and environmental science (Gough et al., 2017). Each time synthesis methods were introduced to a new field, starting with funding from the Medical Research Council to review behavioural interventions to prevent the spread of HIV/AIDS before medical treatments were available (with Deidre Fullerton and Janet Holland in 1993–4; Oakley et al., 1995), the literature inspired (and demanded) innovative methods to assess what could be justifiably learnt from the literature available. There was fierce debate as academics either resisted systematic reviews (Oakley, 2006; Thomas, in press) or accepted the principles and adapted the methods to suit their context of working (Hansen and Rieper, 2009; Langer and Stewart, 2014).

In SSRU, just as listening to research participants and practitioners was key to transforming randomised controlled trials with the integration of process evaluations, so also with systematic reviews. Reviewing studies that included the views of children and young people involved adapting Oakley’s egalitarian methods of interviewing women. The result was an evolving tool for appraising how well researchers: involved children and young people in developing and evaluating health promotion programmes; invited informed consent; assured confidentiality; and placed importance on the perspectives of children themselves, for instance, by asking open-ended questions, and during the analysis (Harden and Oliver, 2001; Rees et al., 2011).

In this way, this small stream of work within SSRU that started in 1993 with compiling controlled trials in education and social welfare (Oakley et al., 2005) grew to pioneer research synthesis methods that suited the task of making sense of different types of research literatures. Each systematic review involved some methodological development, whether this was to address differences in types of questions, types of research available, or breadth and depth of literature. Such methodological problem solving and engaging in academic debates with other research synthesis teams gradually evolved and clarified a range of synthesis designs and methods to suit different purposes and literatures available (Gough et al., 2012b). Oakley and her colleagues developed research methods to find studies of various traditions (Brunton et al., 2017), and to synthesise studies of people’s views (Harden et al., 2004), as well as the effects of social interventions.

The EPPI-Centre’s expectations of methodological rigour were considered unrealistic by health promotion practitioners, and insufficient by epidemiologists. A notable breakthrough came from interrogating the evidence from randomised controlled trials of children’s healthy eating with the findings of a qualitative synthesis of the children’s views. Each literature was reviewed according to the accepted standards of its own field. The findings indicated components of interventions likely to be beneficial (or harmful) that could be explained by qualitative understanding of children’s lives (Thomas et al., 2004). Consequently, the totality of evidence was greater than the sum of the two parts. The approach, when replicated with larger data sets, made it possible to explain two very different approaches for encouraging patients’ adherence to medicines – didactic or interactive (Candy et al., 2011, 2013). This method was qualitative comparative analysis, and when applied to the more complex challenges of understanding how engaging communities can reduce inequalities in health, it identified three distinct promising routes: involving communities in defining their health needs, in intervention design, and in intervention delivery (O’Mara-Eves et al., 2013).

Less visible in the social science literature, but of fundamental importance, was moving systematic reviewing from a paper-based activity into the digital age. Now every review, whether of qualitative or quantitative research, rests on a combination of information science and information technology. Synthesising studies that are scattered across academic disciplines, and published in journals or available through organisations, presented a challenge for managing thousands of reports (largely on paper in the twentieth century, and increasingly online in the twenty-first). It is information science that underpins the development of search strategies (Stansfield et al., 2012, 2014, 2016), and information technology that safeguards the studies identified and accelerates their analysis (Thomas et al., 2011; Stansfield et al., 2017). Regular conversations linked methodological challenges to the development of in-house software, EPPI-Reviewer. This resulted in exceptionally flexible bespoke software to support the whole review process, from identifying studies to appraising and synthesising their findings, across qualitative and quantitative research to accommodate reviews of effectiveness and reviews of people’s perspectives and experiences (Thomas et al., 2022).

As evaluating or reviewing complex social situations became common, the need for different perspectives became greater. Specialist knowledge from different academic disciplines was essential, but not sufficient. Potential outcomes may be more or less important to policymakers, than to those implementing or to those offered a programme. Potential research participants may be ‘hard to reach’, at least by researchers unfamiliar with poorer neighbourhoods, unsettled populations or the languages they speak. Indeed, for one randomised controlled trial, listening to women required employing interpreters for 25 languages (Wiggins et al., 2004). Questionnaires may be hard to complete, or routine data hard to access. Interventions developed in one context may be poorly suited to another. All these challenges require knowledge from people with a stake in the research topic: the policymakers who face constraints when making decisions; managers and practitioners who face constraints when implementing decisions; and the disadvantaged populations who are most often the focus of research, as they struggle to survive on a daily basis. They all hold specialist knowledge about their context of living and working. This is why the egalitarian attitude adopted when interviewing women for data collection (Oakley, 1981) has been similarly adopted in conversations with community groups, advocacy groups, policymakers, managers and practitioners when designing and conducting research.

The principle of listening to a range of stakeholders has been applied to setting research agendas, designing evaluations and systematic reviews, recruiting research participants, collecting data, and interpreting findings. Patient advocates were invited to comment on ideas for health technology assessment and to discuss how best to invite their comments (Oliver et al., 2001a, 2001b), and ultimately to establish partnerships with practitioners for setting research agendas (Cowan and Oliver, 2021; Oliver et al., 2019). Evaluating social interventions now includes reaching women who speak different languages by training health advocates from various interpreting services (Wiggins et al., 2018). Patient advocates and practitioners joined advisory groups to guide procedures and interpret findings. Overall, SSRU’s randomised controlled trials have seen more relevant practitioners actively involved, in increasingly varied and influential study roles, and with greater capacity to contribute to the research process (Sawtell, 2019).

Similar trends can be seen in the systematic review work, beginning with the UK Department of Health, where rigorous research methods were required to produce replicable and updateable reviews that were also relevant and useful. The relevance and utility came from involving potential users in choosing the questions to be addressed, discussing how to find relevant studies, and interpreting the emerging findings (Rees and Oliver, 2017). Guided by these principles, the research methods themselves needed to be adapted to different questions and research literatures as review work expanded to inform many government departments, and particularly the Department for Education and the Department for International Development.

Maximising the relevance of reviews to policy problems and evidence needs came from review teams and potential review users engaging with each other to understand issues from different standpoints, challenging each other, and tackling technical and political constraints to shape review questions and the analysis, and then to interpret the findings (Oliver et al., 2018a). Addressing policymakers’ interests in complex systems and their complex pathways between intervention and outcome continues to drive methodological innovation (Hong et al., 2021; Kneale et al., 2018, 2020). This is particularly so for resource-poor settings where challenges prompted government commissioning of the Centre for Excellence in Development Learning and Impact (CEDIL), where David Gough, as director of the EPPI-Centre, brought his experience of synthesis and studying use of research for policy decisions to his role on the steering group.

For delivering evidence quickly to meet a policy deadline, methods were developed for this too (Thomas et al., 2011, 2013; Wilson et al., 2021), including living maps of evidence to offer easy access to new studies (Shemilt et al., 2022) and information technology to accelerate review processes (Shemilt et al., 2014; O’Mara-Eves et al., 2015; Stansfield et al., 2017).

The methodological innovations for evaluating complex interventions and systematically reviewing diverse literatures to suit the evidence needs of decision-makers have not only stood the test of time, they have also influenced how research is done, how findings are shared and what decisions are made. When Oakley (1999) chose to adopt different research traditions, both successively for different studies and simultaneously within single studies, she drew criticism from both those who espoused qualitative ‘feminist’ methods and those who valued experimental design and precise measures of causal relationships. Just as she embraced different ways of knowing (Oakley, 2000) to study health promotion and education, under her leadership, SSRU continued to combine the two approaches, and over time the practice became more common with academics elsewhere. Advances with systematic review methods met resistance similar to that encountered with primary research. There were objections to synthesising social science using quantitative methods and, conversely, to synthesising qualitative research either at all or not using the ‘right’ method (Thomas, in press). Nevertheless, the EPPI-Centre’s book advocating a broad range of approaches to systematic reviewing (Gough, Oliver and Thomas, 2012; Gough et al., 2017) is widely cited, and listed as a set text in many accredited higher education programmes.

The mainstreaming of research methods advanced at SSRU is now apparent in national and international guidance. Aligned with Oakley’s egalitarian approach, which started with listening to women using NHS services, were SSRU’s advances in patient and public involvement in research. These were integrated into routine procedures for the NHS Health Technology Programme (Oliver et al., 2001a, 2001b), and then across the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). In particular, partnership methods for setting research agendas (Cowan and Oliver, 2021) were developed by the James Lind Alliance, and then taken in house by the NIHR to influence research agendas across the NHS.

Integrating deep listening into evaluations of complex interventions has also been widely taken up. The Medical Research Council (Moore et al., 2015) cites SSRU authors to guide process evaluations of complex interventions (Oakley et al., 2006). Broader Medical Research Council guidance on developing and evaluating complex interventions (Craig et al., 2008), and the updated version prepared with the NIHR (Skivington et al., 2021), similarly cite SSRU authors for integrating process evaluations in randomised controlled trials (Oakley et al., 2006), employing a prospective matched comparison design (Wiggins et al., 2009) and theorising the harmful consequences of public health interventions (Bonell et al., 2015).

Similarly, methods for reviewing people’s views and experiences, not only the effects of interventions, are now widely endorsed. Many EPPI-Centre publications appear in guidance for systematic reviewing published by the Centre for Reviews and Dissemination (2001). Particularly notable was Harden et al.’s (2001) work, which this handbook offered as the first example of reviewing process evaluations. The Cochrane Handbook, which offers guidance to systematic reviewers internationally, now has James Thomas at the EPPI-Centre as co-senior scientific editor (Higgins et al., 2022), and includes many EPPI-Centre advances, from planning a review to transferability of the findings. The United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF), a non-governmental organisation advocating the use of evidence, cites much of SSRU’s work in their guidance for staff on how to undertake, commission and manage evidence synthesis (Bakrania, 2020).

The manual for developing National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (NICE) guidelines cites EPPI-Centre authors for systematic review methods (Gough et al., 2012a, 2012b), in particular for identifying studies (Brunton et al., 2017) and accelerating this process with text mining (Stansfield et al., 2017), reviewing studies of people’s views (Harden et al., 2004), and implementing NICE guidance (Kneale et al., 2016a).

The WHO’s (2021) guide to evidence-informed decision-making draws on EPPI-Centre research for broad approaches to: engaging stakeholders in research and decision-making (Oliver et al., 2018c); systematically reviewing for different types of questions (Gough et al., 2012b, 2019); and engaging decision-makers with evidence through enhancing motivation, skills and access to evidence (Langer et al., 2016).

Guidance for research is not enough. Skills for conducting research and making good use of it are also required for making an impact. The EPPI-Centre has worked with policy organisations nationally and internationally to spread evidence skills through academic, policy and service organisations. When the Department of Health commissioned systematic reviews, they commissioned complementary workshops for practitioners to learn how to appraise research evidence relevant to their own work (Oliver et al., 1996). When interest in systematic reviews spread from health to other sectors, experienced systematic reviewers led workshops for policymakers and offered ongoing methodological support to novice systematic review teams. The EPPI-Centre supported 23 review groups to produce 40 reviews in education, with commentaries from decision-makers outside academia, and supported 66 review teams in international development. When the WHO invested in systematic review centres across the Global South, with EPPI-Centre support, new centres were required to engage with policymakers to identify priority questions (Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research, 2009). Other organisations embarking on producing systematic reviews, or using them for decisions, requested discussions and support tailored to their specific interests, such as literacy and learning, food safety and agriculture. Investment in the next generation to engage with evidence came from building on the resources for continuing professional education, consolidating and developing them further for accredited teaching at postgraduate level. There is now a thriving master’s programme for social research and social policy, including an option to focus on systematic reviews.

While medicine has long been considered a research-based profession, and more so with the growth of systematic reviews, it is relatively recently that Best Evidence Medical Education (BEME) began collating research evidence about educating health professionals, with Mark Newman at SSRU being a founding member. As support and skills have grown in other areas, teaching, policing and health visiting are also maturing as research-based professions. The challenge to teaching came first in 1996, when David Hargreaves (1996), advising government ministers of education, imagined teaching being more effective and more satisfying if informed by research. Teachers’ appreciation of easy access to research, mentioned above, and the investment in this access, considered below, show that this is becoming a reality. Similar developments are happening in policing, and the EPPI-Centre has played important roles working with both professions, producing systematic reviews that address questions raised by the professions, and supporting novice teams to do the same.

In supporting the research base of professions allied to medicine, Oakley and colleagues have contributed randomised controlled trials (Wiggins et al., 2004; Christie et al., 2014) and systematic reviews (Schucan Bird et al., 2015; Caird et al., 2010). Co-authoring much of this work was Mary Sawtell, who combined her profession as a health visitor with her academic research, starting with the randomised controlled trial of health visiting support (Sawtell and Jones, 2002). In 2015, she was appointed Fellow of the Institute of Health Visiting, the national professional body for health visitors, and in 2017, she became their Research Champion, to develop a research-rich culture within the health-visiting workforce, and for the creation of opportunities for more research careers in the allied health professions.

However, individual or even team skills are insufficient for either producing evidence for decisions, or using it. Researchers and decision-makers need conducive environments where structures and networks offer support, access to evidence and procedures to routinise their evidence work. Oakley was a pioneer in this too, starting in the mid-1990s with her contributions to the Cochrane Collaboration, a growing global network committed to producing systematic reviews of healthcare and making them readily available. Her work here began with an informal network of academics interested in changing the behaviours of health professionals and the populations they served. These efforts later consolidated with groups producing systematic reviews addressing, initially, effective healthcare and organisation of practice and, considerably later, public health. These areas of interest lend themselves to crossing the boundaries of health research that were conventionally aligned with specific health conditions. Collaborations and progress here were hampered because promoting healthy behaviour was a poor fit for the fast emerging review groups who shared interests delineated by, for instance, cancer, heart disease or sexually transmitted disease. The core health work of the EPPI-Centre therefore continued to develop novel methods, synthesising qualitative and quantitative studies for tackling major health policy problems, rather than conforming to the interests of academic colleagues more interested in clinical care. Nevertheless, EPPI-Centre colleagues showed commitment to mutual sharing of knowledge and skills by taking on individual roles within Cochrane as authors, editors, methods group convenors and peer reviewers.

Complementing the EPPI-Centre’s portfolio of systematic reviews by teams of largely UK academics in education was the development of a network of 35 education organisations in 23 countries across Europe. This was prompted by the European Commission’s call for projects ‘to develop knowledge brokerage mechanisms in the field of education and training … to strengthen the links between research, policy and practice … [and] to bring research to the attention of policy and decision-makers and practitioners’ (European Commission, 2009a, in Gough et al., 2011: 14). This work built on research and direct experience to understand the range of European activities linking research and policy in education, and training activities developed knowledge and skills for finding, using and interpreting research.

Other organisations took the same two-pronged approach to strengthen capacity in doing and using systematic reviews simultaneously. The Alliance for Health Policy and Systems Research developed a network of review centres across the Global South. Particular emphasis was placed on priority-setting exercises to ensure that systematic reviews addressed concerns considered important by policymakers. The Department for International Development funded academics in development studies to produce systematic reviews, in discussion with their policy teams. With policy teams initiating the questions and discussing the emerging findings, these reviews had an impressive impact on the department's work and elsewhere (Oliver et al., 2020). It was the commitment to choosing from a range of systematic review methods to suit the task in hand – the type of research question and the literature available – that prompted these organisations to invite EPPI-Centre support for their initiatives.

This maturing evidence movement was supported by knowledge infrastructures and procedures for setting research priorities, collating systematic review evidence and making that evidence available in formats accessible to decision-makers. These were all areas pioneered by SSRU.

SSRU’s innovative work of developing consensus methods for setting research agendas, described above, was originally undertaken as pilot studies within the NHS Health Technology Assessment programme and independently with the James Lind Alliance in the early 2000s. During the following decade, these ways of working were institutionalised when the NIHR took responsibility for recruiting and training advisers to guide agenda-setting partnerships.

The EPPI-Centre co-authored a Rapid Evidence Assessment Toolkit for civil servants with the Government Social Research Service (GSR and EPPI-Centre, n.d.). Its ways of working with evidence are embedded in procedures for developing health and social care guidance (NICE, 2014). Further afield, it informed the development of various Scandinavian centres, in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and thinking about use of evidence by the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (Gough, 2007). Beyond government, UNICEF has developed guidance for its own evidence-informed decision-making that draws heavily on the EPPI-Centre’s pluralistic approach to systematic reviewing (Bakrania, 2020).

While these developments suited policymakers who were commissioning evidence, it was a network of What Works Centres that developed toolkits to suit those looking for existing evidence.

Evidence toolkits have been summarising research evidence for a wide range of practitioners, such as police officers, teachers, managers and leaders. The EPPI-Centre has supported this development by contributing content and software.

The What Works Centre for Crime Reduction Toolkit offers evidence appraised and summarised by SSRU, including systematic reviews conducted at SSRU about mental health (Schucan Bird et al., 2018) and domestic violence (Vigurs et al., 2015, 2016). These systematic reviews all share the themes of complex interventions crossing sectoral boundaries, in this case, between health and justice. The review of motivational approaches to reduce domestic violence (Vigurs et al., 2015) also shares the theme of listening deeply to understand those receiving the services, rather than only those providing them.

Similarly, the findings of mixed methods SSRU research have been incorporated into toolkits for teachers and school leaders wishing to improve learning outcomes. For instance, teachers interested in hand-held devices for improving classroom feedback can learn from one of the toolkits (EEF, n.d.) that their peers were impressed by the speed of assessment and feedback, and perceived improvements in student engagement, although there were practical and organisational difficulties, and no improvement in student attainment – all of which was based on an SSRU randomised controlled trial with an integral process evaluation (Wiggins et al., 2017). Such research-based guidance is appreciated by schools (DfE, 2020), particularly during the Covid-19 pandemic (Achtaridou et al., 2022).

In time, the software developed to safeguard data and facilitate analysis in EPPI-Centre systematic reviews was introduced for review authors working with Cochrane and its sister organisation, the Campbell Collaboration, covering sectors beyond health. It also now underpins systematic reviews summarised and made available by What Works Centres for health and social care (NICE), crime reduction (College of Policing) and education (Education Endowment Foundation). The What Works Centres for youth offending and youth employment also use this and other EPPI-Centre software for visualising evidence maps.

Evidence toolkits, and the work of evidence intermediaries more generally, are works in progress, as illustrated by an analysis of What Works Centres (Gough et al., 2018). Intermediary organisations are becoming more explicit about the evidence underpinning their own aims and methods, a step that enhances confidence in claims made about the evidence available and the subsequent uptake of research evidence (Gough et al., 2022). A leading example was NICE, with its Research Support Unit, led by the EPPI-Centre, which conducted research about using real-world data, making decisions by committee and implementing guidance (Kneale et al., 2016a, 2016b; Oliver et al., 2018b).

SSRU’s impact on policy has been achieved less from engaging decision-makers with the findings of their research, and more from shaping the research to focus on the priorities expressed by decision-makers. Systematic reviews of smoking cessation were sharply criticised by health promotion practitioners for compiling biomedical evidence alone. After the research was redesigned to take into account health worker and service user concerns about how to help women quit smoking, and the social and emotional impacts (Oliver et al., 2001c), it informed national guidelines for maternity care in Australia, Brazil, South Africa and the UK. This mixed methods approach to systematic reviewing (Stead et al., 2013) was also influential in shaping national policy for plain tobacco packaging to discourage smoking (Chantler et al., 2014).

Further afield, reviewing qualitative studies (Magwood et al., 2018) influenced the WHO’s recommendation that women carry health records for themselves and their children (WHO, 2018), and uptake of this recommendation in Afghanistan (Saeedzai et al., 2019). Similarly, the findings of another qualitative synthesis (Eshun-Wilson et al., 2019) helped redesign a service for HIV patients struggling with their antiretroviral therapy (Arendse et al., 2021).

The next step, of implementing policy, also benefited from social scientists bringing direct experience of using or providing public services to the roll-out of national policies. SSRU’s experience of this came from policies supporting pregnant teenagers and teenage parents, and for health screening newborn babies.

Sure Start Plus was a national initiative to support pregnant young women and teenage parents. Innovative approaches were developed locally to explore different ways of delivering services, and the research team shared the findings of their evaluation at regular intervals to allow teams across the country to refine their services (Wiggins et al., 2005).

Policy implementation for screening newborn babies’ blood for rare but serious health conditions took a more centralised approach. As with earlier perinatal research, this work required the ability to navigate natural and social sciences simultaneously. The research team synthesised research about screening experiences, and updated the findings by interviewing parents and clinicians (Stewart et al., 2005; Hargreaves et al., 2005a, 2005b). This research was guided by parents, laboratory scientists, clinicians and data managers, who then guided the subsequent development of new standard practices and training for professionals, and information for parents, all based on research evidence (Stewart et al., 2011). It required SSRU staff to combine their research, facilitation, education and networking skills to work collaboratively across boundaries between professions, between service providers and users, and between the four nations of the UK.

The newborn screening research and development offered midwives training and resources to discuss screening with parents, and made unbiased information available for the parents of the 810,000 babies screened each year and nearly 1,500 who needed further diagnostic tests, and year-on-year improvements in the timeliness of screening (Institute of Education, 2014).

The rigour and relevance of SSRU’s portfolio of studies offered findings that have influenced public services across the world.

This track record of working across boundaries to create new knowledge (Part One) and that new knowledge creating an impact in the wider world (Part Two) raises questions about the critical factors that led to these two achievements.