Minding your Ps and Qs

Tactics are important when writing a funding application and knowing what a given funder is looking for can often give one research application the edge over another. Funding panel meetings have packed agendas where many applications are considered by busy people. Knowing how to write for this audience – how to clearly demonstrate why your research application should be funded – is therefore an important skill. One of my main roles as an NIHR Research Design Service adviser is to help researchers pull together their funding applications – to mould their research ideas into a fundable project and to put this across in what are often stark and word-limited application forms.

If you’re applying to the NIHR for funding, there are two important things to keep in mind when starting to write your application: First, is the need to demonstrate the PRIORITY of your research topic and the second, closely related, is to have a clearly defined research QUESTION which your study will directly address and answer through appropriate design and methods.

The first thing that any NIHR funding panel will do is assess the priority of your research topic and question to service users and the NHS. Therefore, it is imperative that you demonstrate this from the outset. The exception to this rule is when you’re applying to a specific commissioned call, where the job of identifying and prioritizing topics has already been done by NIHR panels convened specifically for this purpose. Still, even here, it is worth addressing why your team’s particular take on the requirements of the commissioning brief are a particular priority for service users.

There are many ways to demonstrate the priority of your research topic & associated questions. Your literature review should demonstrate the knowledge gap that your research question is addressing. Your description of the current care pathway can illustrate how and where the problem caused by this gap manifests itself in clinical practice. Your consultation with service users can help demonstrate the burden of this problem on patients and their families. You can look further afield here as well – for example, speak to any relevant charities and check to see whether the James Lind Alliance has set research priorities for your topic. Talk about what will change in clinical practice as a result of answering your research questions. All of these things will help demonstrate that your research is a priority of funding.

In many ways, these are all fairly obvious and are all probably things you are already doing. However, it is worth bearing in mind that the reason you are writing about the literature, your service user consultations, and the problems with current service provision is to prove to the funding panel why they simply must fund your research:

By so doing, there will be direct benefit to service users and the wider NHS once your study completes.

So, when it comes to your NIHR funding application, you really do need to mind your Ps & Qs. And your local RDS can help you do just that.

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