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About PHIRST

The National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) funds, enables and delivers world-leading health and social care research that improves people’s health and wellbeing and promotes economic growth.

The PHIRST scheme links up academic teams with local government organisations to evaluate public health interventions that are already happening across the UK. There are currently 10 PHIRSTs across the UK, with expertise in public health and evaluation methods. Scroll down for information on our teams.

Our call for applications is now open until 15 September 2026 at 1.00pm. We invite local government teams in England and equivalent organisations in the devolved nations to put forward local interventions that have the potential to impact on health outcomes, where the intervention is in need of evaluation. The PHIRST scheme facilitates robust, academic evaluations of real-world, non-NHS-commissioned public health interventions that are relevant to local government context and timescales. The aim is to build the evidence base for local government decision-making. We are specifically interested in population-level, non-clinical interventions – particularly those addressing the wider determinants of health and that seek to reduce health inequalities. Full details on the NIHR website.

Commissioned in 2020, PHIRST was conceived as a way for local government public health teams to access timely and robust evaluations of their schemes. Find out more about the thinking behind PHIRST's creation in this NIHR blog by Helen Walters, NIHR Public Health Consultant Advisor.

We apply a broad definition of public health and welcome proposals from any relevant area. You can browse the range of schemes we have evaluated on our Evaluations page. You can also browse our database of academic peer-reviewed publications that have arisen from our projects.

We work to mobilise the knowledge from our projects to add to the wider public health evidence base. We undertake post-evaluation reviews to explore how recommendations are being taken forward and what impact the evaluation has had. Find out more about how we work on our Health and Care Professionals page.

You can read about PHIRST news and updates in our newsletter:

• PHIRST Newsletter August 2026

Seminars

We have presented sessions on knowledge mobilisation, building research capacity, public partnerships and evaluations linked to the Covid-19 pandemic. You can read descriptions of the sessions on our seminar page or watch the recordings on our YouTube Channel.

You can watch a recording of the latest seminar: Working with under-served communities in public health research. This webinar presented 3 PHIRST evaluations that involved groups that face additional barriers to participating in research. Presenters shared practical insights into what worked well, what proved challenging, and what can be learned to support more inclusive and context‑sensitive public health research. View the speaker slides.