RAMESES II: Realising the potential of realist research for improving the delivery of health services

The RAMESES II project is a two year multi-methods project funded by the National Institutes of Health Research's Health services and Delivery Programme. The main aims of the project are to develop quality standards, reporting standards and training materials for realist evaluations.

Realist evaluation is a research approach that is designed to answer questions like:

• Why does this intervention or programme work? 
• For whom, does it work? 
• To what extent, in what circumstances and how?

It is used mainly to make make sense of interventions or programmes that are complex.

This project is timely as realist evaluations are increasingly used by researchers in many disciplines. However, with increasing use gaps between methodological know how and application have been exposed, the quality of reporting of realist evaluations mixed and methodological rigour at times questionable. The goal is that this project will help to address all three of these issues through its outputs.