Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what methods he uses to measure the success of public health interventions.

The Public Health Outcomes Framework (PHOF) sets out a national and local overview of public health outcomes supported by the following indicators:

- Improving the wider determinants of health;

- Health improvement;

- Health protection; and

- Healthcare public health and preventing premature mortality.

The PHOF is used as a tool for local transparency and accountability and provides a means of benchmarking progress within and across local authorities.

Where the Department undertakes its own evaluation of specific policies and programmes, the appropriate methods are set out in central guidance. This states that consideration of the return on investment of alternative interventions “should include social value and social costs, such as employment, health, wellbeing and productivity where possible”.

The Department also invests in research and development via the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR). The NIHR invests over £33 million a year in a dedicated Policy Research Programme, which delivers evidence to inform policy development and implementation, including the evaluation of policies and pilots and research to fill longer-term evidence requirements.