Subject Award · Health & Medicine · 2026
The ten finalist universities are the ten highest-ranked on the Health Professions collaboration index, listed here alphabetically until the full index publishes on 15 September. Each finalist is represented by an academic whose recent work exemplifies why: a real project, drawn from the open scholarly record, cited so you can check it.
The finalists
Public Health COVID-19 Impact Assessment: Lessons Learned and Compelling Needs
Written as part of an initiative on priorities for transforming the health system after COVID-19, this piece considers what the pandemic revealed about public health. It draws on contributions commissioned from experts across key sectors of health, health care and biomedical science to set out lessons learned and the needs that remain pressing.
Impact of patient access to their electronic health record: systematic review
Giving patients sight of their own electronic health records is becoming standard practice, but what does it actually change? Screening more than 2,000 papers and analysing 74, this review draws together the reported benefits and problems of patient access through secure provider portals in primary care and hospitals, covering self-care, quality of care and patient-centred outcomes.
Older people moving between care settings frequently experience discontinuous care and poor information transfer among providers. Through a scoping review of studies published between 2000 and 2020, the team mapped the many factors that influence whether innovations designed to improve transitional care are actually implemented, evidence that can help promising approaches take hold in everyday practice.
Good ideas in healthcare often falter at the point of implementation, which is what Normalisation Process Theory sets out to explain. Working from the papers that developed the theory, the study distils it into a ready-to-use coding manual for qualitative researchers, aiming to make analysis more transparent and to lighten the practical burden on those doing it.
Interventions to reduce falls in hospitals: a systematic review and meta-analysis
Falls remain a common and debilitating problem for hospital patients. Pooling 43 studies, 23 of them in meta-analysis, this review examines how far prevention approaches such as staff and patient education, environmental changes, assistive devices, rehabilitation and medication management reduce falls rates and the odds of falling, while noting the marked variation between the studies available.
Health care systems increasingly assume that patients can navigate the digital world, yet some communities are less able or less likely to engage with digital health technologies. Through a systematic review and thematic synthesis of qualitative studies published between 2011 and 2022, the work identifies the barriers and facilitators experienced by culturally and linguistically diverse populations, including minority groups, immigrants and refugees, and Indigenous peoples.
Teachers and school leaders describe work that keeps expanding, and this synthesis of forty studies asks what the research really shows. It distinguishes workload from work intensification, two ideas often conflated, and reports negative effects on health, wellbeing and attrition, alongside concern about teachers' capacity to deliver priorities that support the learning of all students.
Involving patients and the public in healthcare is widely endorsed, yet the theory behind it remains thinly developed. This review of reviews gathers evidence on the theories, barriers and enablers of patient and public involvement across health, social care and patient safety, with an eye to addressing power inequities and the limited diversity of those who take part.
Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology Commission on the Definition and Diagnosis of Clinical Obesity
What counts as clinical obesity, and how should it be diagnosed? Convened as a commission, the work addresses the definition and diagnosis of obesity as a clinical condition, a question that shapes who is recognised as needing care and how that care is described.
Review of multimodal machine learning approaches in healthcare
Clinicians draw on demographics, laboratory results, vital signs and images together, whereas machine learning in medicine has usually worked from one type of data at a time. This review surveys approaches that combine imaging, text, time series and tabular data, walking through the key stages of building such models and how closely they reflect real clinical reasoning.
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Partners verify their data, feature their academics, and are eligible for the Subject Awards. Finalists are identified from open data; winners are decided by our editorial team and announced on 15 September 2026.
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World guidelines for falls prevention and management for older adults: a global initiative
World guidelines for falls prevention and management for older adults: a global initiative
The Digital Health Competencies in Medical Education Framework
World guidelines for falls prevention and management for older adults: a global initiative
A systematic review of the effect of stigma on the health of people experiencing homelessness
The Digital Health Competencies in Medical Education Framework
Continuity and care coordination of primary health care: a scoping review