The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) is the nation’s largest funder of health and care research. NIHR is primarily funded by the
Department of Health and Social Care and invests over £1 billion
annually into research to transform people’s lives. NIHR funds the people, facilities and technology needed for world class research. Impact is a central feature of NIHR’s strategy and operations, with the impact of NIHR research extends across the healthcare system, providing evidence to inform clinical guidelines, enabling cost saving within healthcare delivery and, more broadly, supporting patients to live longer, healthier lives.

To support NIHR researchers to strengthen impact, in late 2020 LILI, along with Lucidity Solutions undertook a rapid review of impact tools openly available for researchers online. This work focused not only on curating the many tools and guides available, but developing a means to help people choose between the options. The outcome of this report was a new guide covering 40+ tools, with a dashboard to support researchers select the most appropriate tool for their work.

NIHR have since developed this tool further into a new, interactive and searchable dashboard, and launched it as an interactive tool in June 2021 (available here, login required), or a pdf version is available below. Whilst it was developed for the NIHR community originally, the content contains guides and frameworks from health, social science, arts, humanities and non-disciplinary focused sources. Please check it out!