BeDMaSH Behavioural & Decision Making Sciences in Healthcare

Background

Health and social care systems across the world are faced with increasing demand and complexity in heath needs within constrained budgets. Designing and delivering prudent healthcare services and public health policy, to ensure resources are used to maximum effect, is a challenging yet vital task.

Healthcare systems are stochastic in nature; that is they typically operate in an environment of uncertainty and variability, both at scale and within highly complex and connected systems. Robust and evidenced-based decision-making is critical, as is the emerging research challenge to better understand and predict human behaviours and how these might be captured within healthcare decision support tools.

In the context of strategic and operational decision-making, systems modelling and simulation has been shown to play a key role. To date, however, modelling approaches often fail to do justice to the behavioural aspects of social systems central to public health and health service interventions. This entails understanding complex interactions and emergent properties rather than just linear cause/effect relationships. For example: peer influence and social networks affect public health policy; staff and patient behaviours and their complex dynamics affect health service policy and effective delivery.

Interactions and relations within a socially complex system thus determine many of the important outcomes. New methods are therefore required to understand these dynamics in order to better inform the design of more effective interventions and optimal health service configurations, as well as explore the cost-effectiveness of psychological versus physiological interventions.

Project Summary

The Initiator Award funded three workshops. The first event launched the network, with attendees from academia, NHS, Public Health and Government stakeholders. Discussions at this event identified emerging themes and grand challenges, which were taken forward into a sandpit event. The sandpit identified research gaps in methodology and implementation: (1) a need for a methods framework into decision making that would integrate different models into a single concept; (2) a need to better understand how behavioural factors affect the conduct of, and interaction with, model-based processes that support problem solving and decision making. The final event explored how to take these ideas forward into external grant applications, to sustain the work of the community. The community were successful in one grant.