Research

We commission and fund NHS and social care research that is essential for delivering our responsibilities in public health and personal social services. Our role is to develop the research evidence to support decision making by professionals, policy makers and patients, make this evidence available, and encourage its uptake and use, for example, through NHS Evidence, which provides clinical and non-clinical evidence and best practice, to make informed decisions. It is for other organisations, such as the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE, to provide national guidance on promoting good health and preventing and treating ill health. We fund research, not implementation or service development.

Our key objective is to improve the quality, relevance, and focus of research in the NHS and social care by distributing funds in a transparent way after open competition and peer review.

We encourage initiatives that increase the potential for quality research to be widely disseminated and freely accessed. We support the principle of Open Access to research as set out in our statement supporting UKPubMed Central. In addition we also part-fund the EQUATOR Network which aims to enhance the reliability of medical research literature by promoting transparent and accurate reporting of health research.

The NIHR funds a range of programmes addressing a broad range of health priorities. Funding is based on the quality and relevance of the research to personal social services and the NHS.

Existing NHS R&D programmes are being expanded and smaller research programmes will be prioritised to ensure that research vital to health and social care is commissioned.

The research innovation pathway

The chart below shows how our major research programmes and initiatives fit into the 'innovation pathway' (please note that the chart is not a comprehensive representation of all NIHR initiatives and does not show formal relationships between programmes and organisations).

The pathway starts with the creation of an innovation, which includes basic research in a laboratory, through to its use in a patient care setting. It covers the full range of interventions, including pharmaceuticals, biologicals, biotechnologies, procedures, therapies and practices, for the full range of health and healthcare delivery such as prevention, detection, diagnosis, prognosis, treatment and care.