Community of Practice

The UK Prevention Research Partnership (UKPRP) Community of Practice (CoP) is a forum to share ideas, opportunities and challenges across the UKPRP Networks and Consortia. By exploring our experiences, we can learn from one another, and together, to improve our ways of working to support non-communicable disease prevention.

“A group of people who share a common concern, a set of problems, or an interest in a topic and who come together to fulfill both individual and group goals.” 1

The CoP provides a place to share our learning across key topics of mutual interest. Communities of practice are iterative and respond to the needs of the group, therefore new topics of interest have emerged as we have progressed, particularly when the new funded Consortia joined. Over time, we will continue to build a body of publicly available knowledge, methods and tools to share learning with each other and the wider prevention research community.

UKPRP Community of Practice objectives

  • Establish good communication between Networks and Consortia to share ideas and practice
  • Identify key areas of mutual interest ‘Development Themes’ and explore these together
  • Develop a body of knowledge, methods, and supporting resources based on learning from ‘Development Themes’
  • Communication and disseminate these outputs more widely to support other interdisciplinary, systems informed research collaborations
  • Raise the profile of UKPRP-funded research, consortia and networks

The Community of Practice is guided by the Collaborative with representatives from each UKPRP Network and Consortium. If you’d like to get in touch to learn more about our work then please contact:

The two Co-Principal Investigators:

The CoP Research Fellow:

Current Development Themes

UKPRP Networks

Lead by:

The Network group explores solutions to common network issues. These include building cross-sector research capacity, developing sustainable collaborations within the networks and between networks and consortia, and sustaining the networks in the longer term.

Consortium and Network management

Lead by:

Multi-sector, multi-disciplinary programmes of research can be complex to establish and manage effectively. Based on our experiences as UKPRP-funded Networks and Consortia, this group identified and shared learning around the formation, implementation and operation of an effective multi-sector collaborative group (including the similarities and differences in the management approach required for success of Consortia and Networks). Our learning was compiled into a toolkit, including information on the key elements of successful project management, top tips, and templates from several Consortia and Networks.

Impact-Oriented Research

Lead by:

Co-developing a shared understanding of approaches to impact-oriented prevention research across the UKPRP and critically reflect on different approaches to impact-orientation. We work closely with other themes and enable the UKPRP groups to share thinking on best practice on maximising societal impact from prevention research.

Commercial sector interactions

Lead by:

To share, compare and reflect on network and consortia approaches to managing interactions with and interference by commercial sector organisations and to consider existing and parallel developments on management of research interactions with the commercial sector. To support and reflect on best practice in these matters.

Systems thinking

Lead by:

A space that facilitates the exchange of successes, problems ideas, knowledge, experiences, and resources emerging across the research programmes. With that, we expect to promote the use of existing systems thinking and complex systems approaches and support the development and adoption of new methods in public health research, maximizing the outputs across the UKPRP Networks and Consortia.

Improving collaborative research practices

Lead by:

The four specific aims of this ‘reflecting-on-research’ theme are:

  • To exchange knowledge and diagnose the challenges facing researchers conducting inter- and transdisciplinary research across the portfolio of UKPRP projects.
  • To review and evaluate steps UKPRP projects are taking to continually improve their inter- and transdisciplinary research practice, whether conducting network development, stakeholder engagement, co-production and impact realisation.
  • To enhance the outcomes of UKPRP research by sharing continual improvement know-how generated across the portfolio of participating projects.
  • To document findings in a ‘playbook’ of research practice improvement as a knowledge base for future researchers and research funders.
  1. http://www.communityofpractice.ca/background/what-is-a-community-of-practice/