Please note, the SIPHER Consortium has now ended.
System-science in Public Health and Health Economic Research
UKPRP award £5 million for 5 years, with an additional £1.2 million investment from the consortium’s partners
Our research
SIPHER aimed to develop systems-based economic evaluation methods and tools to provide a common basis on which to appraise the effectiveness and costs and benefits of policy measures implemented in different sectors. Partnering with Sheffield City Council, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority (GMCA) and the Scottish Government, this consortium focused on four policy priorities – housing, the promotion of mental wellbeing, inclusive economic growth and adverse childhood experiences – and differences between these partners’ implementation systems for these policy areas. The research addressed a critical area of need on providing economic evidence for policy decision-making by end users, and provided tools for iterative, evidence-led refinements of policies by considering the emergent properties of complex systems, including interactions between policy measures, when assessing policy impacts.
Drawing on expertise from systems science and engineering, geocomputation, machine learning and multi-criterion optimisation, SIPHER used complex systems modelling to allow users to understand the nature and timing of policy effects across all relevant outcomes, to forecast what may occur within complex systems under different assumptions about future developments and to assess the distributional impacts of policy scenarios. Economic decision models made transparent the costs, benefits and any necessary trade-offs.
SIPHER’s co-production approach blended workstreams (WS) that develop a thorough understanding of the four policy systems (WS1 – understanding policy actors, decision processes, and policymaker knowledge and beliefs about cause-and-effect relationships in the systems, WS2 evidence synthesis, WS6 eliciting societal values and preferences regarding competing policy outcomes) with complex systems methods (WS3 building a system monitoring and intelligence function, WS4 microsimulation, WS5 system dynamic modelling, and WS7 whole-system economic evaluation).
Aspects of SIPHER’s work continues as the foundation for the UKRI-funded Policy Modelling for Health consortium, which is part of the Population Health Improvement Network supporting innovative research towards tackling the wider determinants of health and reducing inequalities. Policy Modelling for Health is utilising expertise from some of the SIPHER team and is focused on developing advanced computational models to help policymakers explore the likely effects of different policy choices on health outcomes across society.
To stay connected with this modelling work:
Enquiries: healthmod@glasgow.ac.uk
SIPHER Inclusive Economy
The SIPHER Inclusive Economy Datasets were developed to provide a meaningful collection of data that can be used by researchers and policy actors to explore the extent and nature of economic inclusion across Great Britain.
The SIPHER Inclusive Economy (Local Authority Level) Dataset was launched in October 2023 and more recently the SIPHER Inclusive Economy (Ward Level) Dataset provides 13 indicators of economic inclusion across the nearly 8k electoral wards in Great Britain (2019–2021). Developed using administrative and synthetic data, this resource supports applications across policy and research with a focus on economic inclusivity at a granular spatial scale.
SIPHER-HWMIC
The SIPHER-HWMIC (Health and Wellbeing Multi-Instrument Comparison) dataset provides a unique resource for researchers and policymakers seeking to understand and compare different measures of health and wellbeing.
Traditionally, wellbeing research has focused on income as a key indicator. SIPHER-HWMIC supports capturing a broader spectrum of health and wellbeing outcomes through a large-scale, cross-sectional online survey of over 12,000 UK adults.
The dataset is available as part of the UK Data Service Data Collection.
Connecting with Prevention Research
The recent Prevention Research Conference 2026 at the VOX Birmingham 4–5 March 2026 created valuable opportunities for discussion and debate across the prevention research community.
Professor Petra Meier — formerly Director of the now-completed SIPHER Consortium — chaired a lively interactive plenary roundtable exploring what healthier and more equitable futures could look like.
It was exciting to hear about the latest developments and innovations in prevention research, and to exchange ideas with researchers, policymakers and practitioners.
For further details see the SIPHER website.
Resources
- 13 inclusive economy indicators, with associated trend data and an interactive mapping function that describe the extent and nature of economic inclusion across all local authorities in Great Britain.
- A Synthetic Population dataset and interactive dashboard that provides access to a ‘digital twin’ of the adult population in England, Scotland and Wales. Combining census and survey data, this tool provides unique insight into the population’s health, socio-economic and living circumstances at high spatial resolution.
- A layered systems map combining published evidence and lived experience perspectives on the relationship between housing and health.
- The SIPHER Inclusive Economy (Local Authority Level and Ward Level) Datasets
- The SIPHER-HWMIC (Health and Wellbeing Multi-Instrument Comparison) dataset
- UK Prevention Research Partnership (UKPRP) held a kick off meeting with the award holders from the first funding round on 25 September 2019. Download the slides presented by SIPHER (PPT, 5MB).
Co-directors
Petra Meier
Professor of Public Health
MRC/CSO Social & Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow
Consortium members
The consortium’s membership includes:
- Research academics who provide expertise in disciplines including public health, system dynamics modelling and microsimulation, economics and health economics, urban studies and planning, and social policy.
- Key policy partners – Sheffield’s Director of Public Health, GMCA’s Head of Research and the Co-lead of the Scottish Government’s Public Health Reform Programme – are embedded as co-investigators in the membership.
- The Alan Turing Institute for expertise in IT infrastructures and spatial microsimulation.
- Practice partners such as Public Health England (PHE), Public Health Wales, NHS Health Scotland, the Local Government Association (LGA), and the National Institute for Health (NICE), Edinburgh City Deal, Learn Sheffield, Sheffield City Partnership and Northern Health Sciences Alliance amongst others.
Marion Bain
Co-Director of the Executive Delivery Group for Public Health Reform
Mark Birkin
Professor of Geography and Co-Director of Leeds Institute for Data Analytics
John Brazier
Professor of Health Economics and Dean of the School of Health and Related Research
Alison Heppenstall
Professor in Geocomputation, Leeds Institute for Data Analytics
Nik Lomax
Associate Professor in Data Analytics for Population Research
Ruth Lupton
Professor of Education, Director of the Inclusive Growth Analysis Unit
Suzy Paisley
Information Specialist and Director of Innovation and Knowledge Transfer (IKT)
Knowledge transfer partners
- Brian Ferguson, Chief Economist – Public Health England
- Mark Bellis, Director of the WHO Collaborating Centre for Investment in Health – Public Health Wales
- Neil Craig, Principal Public Health Advisor – NHS Health Scotland
- Gillian Leng, Deputy Chief Executive – NICE
- Oonagh McGee, Head of Research Management – Alan Turing Institute
- Ritchie Somerville, Data Innovation Director – Edinburgh City Deal
- Stephen Betts, Chief Executive – Learn Sheffield
- Rt Hon David Blunkett, Chair – Sheffield City Partnership
- Shirley Hannan, Head of Research Partnerships – Northern Health Sciences Alliance
- Paul Ogden, Senior Advisor – Local Government Association
