DOI: 10.12688/wellcomeopenres.27646.1 ISSN: 2398-502X

From evidence to impact: reflections on the SPECTRUM Consortium’s work on the commercial determinants of health

Charlotte Wendelboe-Nelson, Linda Bauld, Garth Reid, Anna Orme, Niamh Fitzgerald
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The SPECTRUM Consortium (Shaping Public hEalth poliCies To Reduce ineqUalities and harM) was a UK Prevention Research Partnership-funded, multi-university, multi-agency consortium that worked between 2019 and 2025 to shape public health policy and practice on non-communicable disease prevention and the commercial determinants of health (CDOH), focusing on tobacco, alcohol and foods high in salt, sugar and fat. Guided by a Theory of Change and an associated Impact Framework, SPECTRUM organised its work around three interconnected impact pathways: Engagement and Knowledge Exchange, SPECTRUM Research, and Research Landscape. This article reflects on the Consortium’s experience of pursuing impact across these pathways, using the Impact Framework to structure both an account of activities and outputs and a critical assessment of what worked well, what fell short, and what this suggests for future research consortia. Effective strategies included embedding knowledge brokers within policy organisations, sustained co-production with public involvement panels and citizens’ juries, and the development of shared analytical tools and conceptual models that strengthened the emerging field of CDOH. Persistent challenges included the absence of systematic monitoring and evaluation of impact, uneven integration across work packages, and tension between the pace of policy windows and the time needed for rigorous research. Reflecting across all three pathways, the Consortium found that the Theory of Change worked well as a tool for aligning stakeholders at the outset but was underused as an instrument for ongoing evaluation once the programme was under way. The experience points to the value of treating impact frameworks as evolving hypotheses rather than fixed blueprints, and of investing deliberately in structural mechanisms, such as embedded knowledge brokers and dedicated evaluation capacity, rather than relying on individual researcher effort alone to sustain the relationships and systems through which policy-relevant, cross-disciplinary research on CDOH generates impact.

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