Our Research
The Institute of Population Health has been created to enable the University of Manchester to reach its full potential as an internationally esteemed centre for research and education in population health and health sciences. The Institute will translate its expertise into improved health and wellbeing for people locally, nationally and internationally.
Centres
Population Health is home to six centres:
- Centre for Biostatistics
- Centre for Epidemiology
- Centre for Health Economics
- Centre for Health Informatics
- Centre for Imaging Sciences
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Centre for Primary Care
The centre makes a major contribution to the NIHR Greater Manchester Primary Care Patient Safety Translational Research Centre
Staff in other Faculty institutes, University schools, and NHS partner trusts will be affiliated to the Institute to contribute to shared programmes of work.
Research aims
Our research aims to both improve people's health and reduce inequalities in health* through:
- Improved understanding of the factors underpinning disease causation, progression, and response to treatment
- Innovations in healthcare policy, organisation and delivery, including screening and prevention*
- Better tailoring of health interventions to the needs of the individual, including innovations in personalised / stratified medicine*
*cross-cutting Faculty research theme to which we will contribute.
Research expertise
Our areas of research expertise include:
Methodological research:
Advanced methodology in biostatistics, health economics, informatics and imaging, all develop methodological innovations in their respective fields, as well as support high quality research in other Faculty institutes and schools. Teams within these disciplines contribute to the University's research effort in national priority areas such as:
- Brain science and mental health
- Cancer
- Cardiovascular disease and
- Diabetes/obesity
Key capabilities include:
- Controlled trial design and analysis
- Health technology assessment
- Evidence synthesis
- Bio-banking
- Medical imaging; and
- Biomarker development
Health policy and practice:
Health policy and practice is a major focus for research across a number of teams. Broadly speaking, this work is focused on:
- Analysing government policy as it affects health and health care
- Exploring the impact of changing policy
- Describing, explaining and evaluating variations in health care organisation and delivery; and
- Developing and evaluating strategies to improve care, ranging from policy interventions to trials of complex interventions to improve patient outcomes
Teams working in this field contribute to the University's research effort in priority areas such as mental health, cardiovascular disease, patient safety and multi-morbidity.
Population health:
Our population health scientists investigate
- The factors determining disease risk
- Variation in treatment response
- Clinical progression and outcome
- Applying epidemiology approaches to the analysis of biological samples and
- Clinical data generated through the University's bio-banking facilities (CIGMR) and the Northwest e-Health e-Lab (NIBHI)
Similar methodologies are deployed to describe, explain and evaluate variations in care provision, exploiting the unique database resources generated by
- NDEC (drug misuse)
- TARN (trauma)
- COEH (occupational health)
