Funding updates
Published:
HRB welcomes €15 million investment to support ageing well in Ireland
The award will support a further three waves of The Irish LongituDinal Study on Ageing (TILDA)* project to collect information on health, economic and social circumstances of a representative group of adults aged 45 years and over between 2023 and 2030.
The new funding was announced by Minister for Health Stephen Donnelly and Minister for Mental Health and Older People, Mary Butler. It will be managed by the Health Research Board, which also oversaw a rigorous international peer review process and a review of outputs, outcomes and impacts from TILDA to date*.
Welcoming the new investment, Dr Mairéad O’Driscoll, Chief Executive of the HRB, said:
“We are delighted to support this investment.
"Our review process demonstrated that TILDA is highly regarded by stakeholders nationally and internationally. TILDA outputs are amongst the top 25% most cited academic publications worldwide.
"More importantly, there is clear evidence that TILDA has informed policy and practice across many areas such as nursing home responses to COVID-19, dental services coverage in rural areas and demand for home support services for people aged over 65 years. We look forward to seeing the impact of this next round of funding in years to come”.
To date, TILDA has resulted in findings that have been cited in over 150 policy documents in Ireland and internationally. Its ongoing research programme has also produced over 500 peer-reviewed articles and formed the basis for over 50 reports and discussion papers.
Among the objectives of the new award, TILDA will:
- Continue to collect a core set of data on a nationally representative, longitudinal sample of people aged 50 and over in Ireland and examine the principal influences on successful ageing, and
- Analyse data and translate findings to inform future planning, implementation and evaluation of national policies programmes and services in Ireland.
Dr Teresa Maguire, Director of Research Strategy and Funding at the HRB, added:
"The investment will support three further waves of data collection. It will also see the transfer of all existing and newly collected TILDA data to the Central Statistics Office (CSO) Administrative Data Centre.
"This change will deliver expanded and timely access for policy, planning and research purposes, while also protecting the privacy and confidentiality of study participants.
"This gives effect to the HRB ambition to ensure that all research it funds is managed appropriately, complies with FAIR** principles and is as open as possible to maximise impact."
Read the full press release from the Department of Health
ENDS
*The Independent Programme of Evaluation of the State’s Investment in the Irish National Longitudinal Study on Ageing (TILDA), conducted by UCD-Consult, is available to download from the publications section of the HRB website. It examines TILDA outputs, outcomes, and impact to date, and assesses its performance in the context of comparable international cohort studies.
**FAIR: The HRB supports the principle that research data should be Findable, Accessible, Interoperable and Reusable. See also: https://www.nature.com/articles/sdata201618