The International Network to Support Understanding of Health Research (NSUHR) was established at a conference held at Kellogg College, Oxford, on 7-8 April 2011.
Conference participants, all of whom are involved in efforts to improve understanding of health research, came from six countries. They felt that mutual benefit would result from sharing experiences, both of their development of educational resources, and of methods to evaluate whether these resources were achieving their intended objectives.
Participants at the conference decided to establish an international Network which is open to anyone who identifies with its objectives and ethos. They agreed that Amanda Burls should lead efforts to obtain resources to help develop it.
Steering Group
A Steering Group has been established to guide the development of the Network, with members drawn initially from among those who participated in the Oxford conference. Current membership includes: Gerd Antes, Douglas Badenoch, Amanda Burls, Iain Chalmers (convenor), Arthur Hjorth, Kendall Krause, Andy Oxman, Sarah Rosenbaum, Lisa Schwartz and Steve Woloshin.
Dear NSUHR-team,
can you tell what the target group in this network is?
Is it the patient, the healthy population or are there also health care professionals and students included?
Kind regards
Tobias
Thanks for your interest, Tobias. The goal of the international Network to Support Understanding of Health Research (NSUHR) is to help those who are trying to help people become more discriminating users of health research.
For example, I try to help people with the two websites that I edit – http://www.testingtreatments.org and http://www.jameslindlibrary.org. But I am sure that others in NSUHR will have useful advice about how I might do a better job.
Welcome Tobias!
I think it depends on whether you mean ‘target group’ as the people we are trying to communicate with, or ‘target group’ as the people who should join the network.
I the case of the former, I would say that the target group includes all the groups you mentioned – and even more.
For patients and their relatives, we hope that having access to high quality resources on how to make sense of health research will help them better understand their disease and the treatments provided. For health care professionals, we hope that having access to good teaching resources can help them better communicate what constitutes good research – in lecture halls or over red wine. For teachers and students, from early science in primary school to the university level, we hope that long term our repository will offer high quality resources that can be used to support curriculum or as extra curricular activities.
Finally, we hope that broadening participation in a culture of critically examining and interrogating the overwhelming amounts of claims that, “Studies show…” in popular media will help everybody make better decisions, in sickness and in health.
If by ‘target group’ you mean who should join the network, I would say anyone who wants to actively participate in finding or creating and assessing those resources.