The Health Research Board (HRB) is in the process of contracting a research service to conduct evidence reviews for the Department of Health (DoH).
According to a recently published tender document, the HRB evidence centre requires a research service “with strong systematic review capacity to support the evidence requirements of the DoH for the period April 2023 to April 2027”.
The maximum available budget for all research services carried out within the four‒year period is €610,000.
The service will be required to complete a minimum of one evidence review each year (or two evidence briefs) and a maximum of 2.5 evidence reviews (or five evidence briefs) each year.
Evidence reviews take six-to-eight months, while evidence briefs take three-to-four months, according to the tender.
It is expected that any request made to the service will be commenced within one month of the initial request.
“Ideally, the service should comprise a team leader or coordinator, a minimum of two PhD-level researchers, and a library service with access to health and social care databases,” according to the document.
“The service will need to have licenses to relevant software for completing the systematic reviews.”
The contract will require a minimum of approximately 192 days’ work annually.
“The research service employees may need to spend a certain amount of this time in the offices of the HRB in order to meet HRB and DoH colleagues, and agree screening, quality assessment scores, extraction, and quality of evidence scores,” according to the tender. The tender states it is important that potential applicants note that the products are owned by the HRB and Department, and their permission will be required to publish them as ‘grey literature’ (materials and research produced outside of the traditional commercial or academic publishing and distribution channels) or peer review papers or reports. The deadline for the tender is 20 March.
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