Case study: New e-platform helps demonstrate the impacts of research

The benefits to being involved in delivering and taking part in research are well documented. VICTOR (Making Visible the ImpaCT Of Research) is a tool - developed by NHS organisations across Yorkshire and Humber - to help collect and make visible the unintended impacts of research.

Here, VICTOR implementation lead, Dr Natalie Jones tells us more about the role the tool can play and how researchers can get involved.

Understanding the impact of my research has always been a crucial aspect of my work. In 2023, I was thrilled to be recognised for my research impact activities with the NHS England Chief Allied Health Professions Officer's Award for Research Impact - cementing my ambition to help others amplify and elevate their impacts.

Increasingly, researchers are called upon to provide evidence of impact, yet uncertainties remain as to how to effectively achieve this.  I believe that the VICTOR tool is an opportunity for researchers and organisations to provide this evidence tailored to different audiences.

The VICTOR story started in 2017-18 when I was seconded to the NIHR along with a colleague to lead the co-design of a research impact tool aimed at identifying significant research impacts within the NHS - particularly for services and patients. This involved collaboration with twelve NHS organisations across Yorkshire and Humber to co-create the pilot tool. The goal was to highlight the unintended impacts of clinical research - often referred to as bi-products or softer impacts - which frequently go unnoticed. This work has been published in several journals, and you can read more about the story of VICTOR here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37798616/

In my practice, I recognise the importance of clearly articulating research impacts related to service delivery improvements, direct patient care, and workforce improvements and this inspired me to write an editorial ‘call to action’ for other allied health professionals on the importance of reporting research impacts (read more here: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0308022620988473).

Since 2018, the VICTOR tool has been available for download: https://www.e-repository.clahrc-yh.nihr.ac.uk/visible-impact-of-research/ and hundreds of copies have been downloaded.

Researchers are now using VICTOR to explore the impacts of portfolio-adopted studies and career development research awards. For instance, Forero and Palmer (2021) (read more here: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1460-6984.12814) used VICTOR to capture impacts from the NIHR funded study Big Cactus. They used VICTOR to demonstrate research impacts such as: health benefits for patients, service and workforce improvements and how the study enhanced the profile of the organisations involved. Respondents discussed a desire to take on more research roles and shared how it had increased research awareness of the clinical team as well as creating a normalisation of ‘research as business as usual’.

Although originally intended for a different purpose, VICTOR has also been used to capture impacts from research capacity-building activities, proving its versatility. An example of this is evaluating the impact of an AHP and nursing internship programme (read more here: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/37795565/)

In 2021-22, additional NIHR funding enabled the development of an electronic version, resulting in VICTOR Version 2. After prototyping with stakeholders in Yorkshire and Humber, a fully implementable product was completed in 2023.

The new platform is now ready for rollout and I am delighted to have supported the implementation of e-VICTOR across Yorkshire and Humber. In the last two months, more than 50 new users have set up accounts and many have completed impact visual summaries to showcase impacts within their organisations. These summaries are being used for academic publications, trust board presentations, senior leadership briefings, quality reporting and CQC inspections. I am thrilled that my own experiences with using VICTOR as an actionable tool to capture impacts can help researchers in their own quest to demonstrate the added value that research can bring.

For more information about e-VICTOR, please contact Natalie Jones, VICTOR Implementation Lead, NIHR CRN Yorkshire Humber,  natalie.jones56@nhs.net @natlouj

Read about the origins of VICTOR here: https://www.nihr.ac.uk/blog/a-victor-y-for-measuring-research-impact-in-the-nhs/12081

Download the paper version of the tool here: https://hseresearch.ie/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/VICTOR-pack.pdf

Find out more about VICTOR: Powtoon - VICTOR Making visible the impacts of research