A team of ISER researchers will lead the impact evaluation part of a major national research project on the Government’s Healthy Babies initiative.
Professor Birgitta Rabe, Professor Emilia Del Bono, Dr Hiromi Yumoto and Dr Victoria Biagi will be leading the impact evaluation, focussing on the main outcomes on infant feeding, perinatal mental health, and parent-infant relationships.
Healthy Babies is part of the Government’s commitment to making this generation of children the healthiest ever and giving every child the best start in life. Best Start Family Hubs and the Healthy Babies programme are central to this. These utilise a prevention-first model of healthcare, where local authorities bring together education, health and family services, reaching families from the moment they know that they are expecting. Local authorities are able to meet families in early years settings, community spaces, and online in order to reach as many as possible and work toward universal coverage for all families.
RAND Europe is leading the research programme evaluating Healthy Babies, in collaboration with the team at ISER University of Essex, alongside the University of York, IFF, London Economics, TONIC, Born in Bradford, and the IFS to deliver a large-scale evaluation of Healthy Babies over the next three years. This independent evaluation is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care to generate evidence on the delivery and outcomes of the Healthy Babies programme.
The project is a collaborative partnership that brings together expertise in health and early years policy; economic, impact, and realist evaluation; community engagement and lived-experience research.
Together, they will evaluate how Healthy Babies is delivered, the difference it makes for babies and families, and whether it provides value for money. The evaluation is organised across seven different work strands:
- Pre-planning and scoping: Working with the Department of Health and Social Care, local authorities, and families to co-design the evaluation.
- Thematic reviews: Examining priority issues to address any evidence gaps, such as understanding service quality, workforce capability, and service integration.
- Impact evaluation: Building on existing evidence, a range of quasi-experimental and theory-based approaches will assess the services’ contribution to outcomes.
- Value-for-money evaluation: Assessing the costs and benefits of Healthy Babies funded services, using financial data and detailed costing evidence from local authorities, including how costs and benefits are distributed across population groups and areas.
- Contribution analysis and process evaluation: Examining how and why Healthy Babies works differently in different locations, collecting evidence through fieldwork and case studies.
- Local evaluation: Helping local authorities build the capacity to evaluate their services and use evidence to improve future delivery.
- Evidence synthesis and reporting: Bringing our findings together for national and local decision makers.
This project aims to build a lasting legacy of stronger local evaluation capacity by working with local authorities to understand their support needs and build their capability to conduct future evaluations, as well as providing national evidence surrounding health for children and parents.
This independent evaluation is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care to generate evidence on the delivery and outcomes of the Healthy Babies programme.