Over the years, the Network has secured research funding of over HKD $14 million from a wide range of sources including the Health and Health Services Research Fund, Health Care and Promotion Fund, Quality Education Fund, AIDS Trust Fund, Queen Elizabeth Hospital Grant, and Competitive Earmarked Research Grant, etc. Results and findings of these research projects have generated numerous publications in the form of original articles in refereed academic journals, books, training videos and manuals, conference proceedings, newspaper commentary, and presentations such as press release and open forum discussions.

In the past, the Network has also successfully extended its mission to help building community capacity by nurturing sustainable research programs in the community. Major collaborating projects include: Safe Community Program and TEACH-VIP (Violence Injury Prevention) with World Health Organization (WHO), Supportive Supervision Scheme (SSS) with Hong Kong Professional Counselling Association, the Intensive Community Mentoring Scheme under the auspicious of Quality Education Fund, and the currently run Church Intensive Community Mentoring jointly organized with the Hong Kong Church Network for the Poor. The Network maintains a research archive on health and welfare studies. The archive has accumulated more than 20 entries in an electronic database on a wide range of topics under the Network’s major research tenets. The archive is open to all APSS staff, providing instant access to research materials in a systematic and organized context.

The Network for Health & Welfare Studies (the Network) was formed under the Department of Applied Social Sciences at the Hong Kong Polytechnic University in 1997. It carries a mission of fostering and facilitating multi-institutional/ multi-disciplinary research in the field of applied health and social welfare studies, with a special emphasis on outcome evaluation. Research collaborations under the Network are united with an emerging theme, which is to cultivate an evidence-based research paradigm for problems observed in the applied setting, focusing on sustainability of such evaluation program through integrating research into service delivery.

 Apart from encouraging collaboration among academics from the local universities, the Network also nurtures joint research efforts with both local and international institutions such as elderly, children and family services, psychiatric rehabilitation services, schools and hospitals. Major tenets of these research efforts include seamless integration of social and medical services for the elderly, criterion-referenced evaluation of human service professional education, the epidemiology and home prevention program of unintentional childhood injuries, as well as school teacher professional development programs.