What we said we would do
Vision:
By 2028, ARCs will be recognised as international leaders in knowledge mobilisation (KM) ensuring evidence is meaningfully integrated into public health, health, and social care decision-making. Our work will drive policy, practice, and system change, improving health and social care.
Mission:
Use KM approaches to increase visibility, accessibility, and use of research-based knowledge (irrespective of whether the knowledge is produced by ARCs or others) within, between and beyond the ARCs.
In enacting this vision and mission, we will be operationalising the NIHR (funding call) definition of KM which is as follows:
KM is an iterative, long-term, and two-way process to create the conditions to enable the right people to use the right information at the right time. It involves a two-way dialogue between researchers and research users. By sharing information with and learning from each other, a deeper understanding capable of catalysing change can be achieved. It is one of the processes that facilitates and amplifies the contribution of research to real-world settings.
The NIHR is committed to maximising impact by enabling and supporting the translation of research findings into evidence-based action that transforms the lives of the public, patients, service users and carers.
The range of KM approaches adopted across the ARCs will of course reflect the different personal, professional and organisational contexts in which they are deployed. There is a both a need and expectation (from NIHR) that we will capture, analyse and report on the impact of KM activities as they occur. Doing this will facilitate shared learning of what is working, where, how and why.
We said that we would work with all 15 of the ARCs to develop a common reporting framework and to build structures that will facilitate longitudinal evaluation. At our in-person meeting in Manchester back in April, we agreed to collectively adopt the SPIRIT Action Framework Modified for Engagement (SPIRIT-ME) to capture analyse and report on our KM activities as they unfold.
Introducing SPIRIT-ME
The SPIRIT (‘Supporting Policy In health with Research: an Intervention Trial’) framework was originally developed to explain and test how research evidence gets used in health policy decisions.[1] In its updated form – SPIRIT-ME – it provides a conceptual roadmap for evaluating academic–practice engagement interventions.[2] The framework delineates key domains in relation to evidence use, such as catalysts (triggers, opportunities and motivations), capacity (individual, organisational and systemic), engagement actions (pull, push, linkage and exchange and system-level), and outcomes (instrumental, tactical, conceptual and others). A new domain for impacts and sustainability was added to capture beneficial effects of engagement on health and social care outcomes, the ongoing activities needed to sustain these effects over time, and the importance of monitoring for unintended consequences.
Importantly for our purposes, SPIRIT-ME moves beyond linear ‘research-to-practice’ models and instead conceptualises knowledge mobilisation as a dynamic, multilevel process – operating at the individual, organisational and system levels, with interactions and feedback loops between them. This perspective aligns well with the co-produced, context-sensitive nature of KM within, between and beyond the ARCs.
What we would like from you
We are keen to limit the reporting burden and so at this stage what we would like is for each of the appointed ARC KM Fellows (or equivalent) to use the domains of the SPIRIT-ME framework (like a logic model) to depict their planned KM activity and the intended outcomes and impacts. This should include details about their own role and skills.
This will enable us to build a taxonomy of KM processes, intended outcomes and impacts across the ARC network as a whole. And from this we will then be able to identify and agree a standard set of core metrics to routinely capture the KM activity articulated in the SPIRITME models going forward.
Deadline for completion of the SPIRIT-ME models is Friday 29th August 2025.