Part 2:: An inventory of Swedish public health research

In its appropriation directions to the National Institute of Public Health (NIPH) for the 2003 fiscal year, the Government stated that: "NIPH and the Research Council for Working Life and Social Sciences (FAS) should, in partnership with other relevant stakeholders, compile a status report on Swedish public health research." With this purpose in mind, a questionnaire was sent out to the funders of such research to obtain data on the size of funding given to projects, programmes and employment posts during 2001. In addition, a data-based questionnaire was sent out via email to all the university and university college departments who might be conducting public health research. If such research was being performed, the questionnaire was answered by providing the names of researchers and PhD students and information as to the focus of the research. In addition to these questionnaires and further contact with funders, we have also listed the number of public health projects that have received funding in the period 2000-2003 by consulting their websites. Using the names of researchers given to us by the departments as part of the questionnaire, we also searched in the Medline biographical database for publications produced during the period Jan 2000-June 2003. The results of a study on gender-oriented public health research have been incorporated into this inventory. The results indicate that Swedish public health research received a total of SKr 225 million in funding in 2001. Nearly half of this came from research councils (47%), the rest from foundations (16%), agencies (15%), insurance companies (17%) and county councils/regions (5%). This is equivalent to about 9% of total funding to medical research when permanent faculty funding for services etc., has been subtracted. Just over 600 researchers and 600 PhD students say they work either full or part time within the field of public health research. Postgraduate studies can be found at 55 of the 66 institutions that pursue public health research and 37 of them run master's programmes. An operationalized definition has been used to classify funded projects and publications as public health research. Projects and publications have been categorized into the following categories: theory/method, aetiology/incidence, intervention and health policy. Publications have also been classified into 11 other categories corresponding to each of the objectives for Swedish public health policy as adopted by the Swedish Riksdag in the spring of 2003. When the research content was divided into the above-mentioned categories, we found that the largest amount (SKr107 million) was paid out to research into aetiology, while theory/method received SKr 22 million, intervention SKr 14 million and health policy SKr 12 million. The remaining SKr 70 million has gone towards programme support and to funding employment posts. Applying the classification only to project funding, we found that 79% goes to aetiology, 14% to theory/method, 9% to intervention and 7% to health policy. A classification of project titles results in a similar distribution. In total, Swedish public health researchers published 1,280 unique articles in English in periodicals listed in Medline over the 3.5-year period (Jan 2000-June 2003). When these are classified into the four categories above, the same pattern is found, although a slightly larger percentage constitutes research into aetiology (75%) whilst a smaller proportion is classified as intervention research (3%). When the articles were categorized according to the eleven public health objectives, we found that a fifth could be said to concern knowledge about "better health in working life" and its relevance for public health, whilst 14 and 13% of the articles respectively concerned "healthy and safe environments" and "better health promotion in the health care service". The articles that could not be categorized into any of the objectives but concerned methods, health care administration, etc., made up 17%. A quarter of the researchers who answered the gender inventory questionnaire described themselves as gender researchers, but only 4.5% could be defined as such using the applicable criteria. Despite a certain amount of non-response and some difficulties in defining public health research and in classifying the subject areas, we can draw the conclusion that the research area of aetiology/incidence is very dominant, both regarding funding and publications. Intervention research constitutes only a modest proportion of funding and publications. Gender-oriented public health research science is relatively sparse, especially if we look at theoretically well-founded gender research. There are no studies evaluating structural measures and health promotion processes in municipalities and county councils. © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd.