We’ve made significant progress in improving how we work with patients and the public, but we need to work harder to reach out to communities if we want to make research truly inclusive.
Professor Mala Rao OBE established the Ethnicity and Health Unit, under the Department of Primary Care and Public Health, at Imperial College London and NIHR ARC Northwest London to apply an evidence-based approach to addressing ethnic health inequalities. In this blog she explores the scale of the problem in the research arena and issues a rallying call for action.
Professor Mike Lewis, Director of NIHR's Invention for Innovation (i4i) Programme, reflects on this year’s FAST funding pilot and the projects it’s funded.
NIHR Chief Executive Professor Lucy Chappell writes about her recent visit to South Africa and Malawi, and the power of bidirectional learning.
Dr Panos Spanakis, Honorary Fellow at the University of York explains how more needs to be done to ensure people with severe mental ill health have the skills they need to fully engage with and benefit from the Internet and digital technologies. He considers the negative impacts of being digitally excluded and suggests ways to promote digital inclusion
Dr Jenny Harlock tells us how research can help social care professionals build their careers and why she has signed up to be a Link and Learn mentor
How social care practitioners can play an active role in NIHR research funded to help improve social care services.
Professor Catherine Walshe, Co-Director of the International Observatory on End of Life Care at Lancaster University, explains how delivering research in care homes is becoming increasingly important with an ageing population.
For Peer Review Week 2022, NIHR Journals Library Editor-in-Chief Andrée le May explains why research integrity is vital for improving everyone’s health
NIHR liver disease experts are calling for new research collaborations and ways of working to improve identification and management of chronic liver disease.
What are the top 10 priorities for Social Work Research and the opportunities for the sector to engage and make the most of research?
What steps can researchers take to build trust and improve ethnic representation in health and social care research?
Professor Andrew Ustianowski, Joint National Specialty Lead for Infection, and Tracy Harman, Head of Medical Directorate, reflect on how COVID-19 impacted the research delivery landscape and how the research community can learn from this legacy.
Following Health and Social Care Secretary Sajid Javid releasing England's first Rare Diseases Action Plan, Hannah Stark, Operations Lead at the NIHR BioResource, explains the importance of a national concerted effort to tackle rare diseases and the role of volunteer participant cohorts.
Research has uncovered how historical and contemporary injustice and institutional mistrust influenced how public health information was received by ethnic minority communities during the COVID-19 pandemic. Professor Tushna Vandrevala describes how important it is to get government messaging right and the advice from her research on creating inclusive and effective health behaviour communications.
Adam Harangozó, NIHR’s first Wikipedian in residence explains how the NIHR has joined forces with Wikimedia UK to disseminate health and care research using Wikipedia. Simply put, Wikipedia is where people look for information.
Richard Francis, Head of Research at the Stroke Association, writes about the charity’s new funding partnership with NIHR’s Programme Grants for Applied Research (PGfAR). He explains how together, we’re opening a funding competition for research that can improve rehabilitation and long-term care for stroke survivors.
Professor Lucy Chappell, Chief Executive Officer of the NIHR, writes about her experience of gender bias in the workplace and as a female consultant and calls for everyone in the research community to promote a gender equal world.
For International Women’s Day, Mirae Harford, a specialist registrar in intensive care medicine and former NIHR Academic Clinical Fellow, writes about the challenges of female early career researchers and how funders can break the bias against women in research.
Professor Mike Lewis, Director of NIHR's Invention for Innovation (i4i) Programme highlights how the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a shakeup of some research funding models and explains how the NIHR's new, pilot FAST funding scheme, will provide accelerated, simple funding to allow innovations to be further explored for follow-on investment.
Emma Palmer Foster, Chair of the NIHR Invention for Innovation Product Development Awards Selection Committee A, writes about what excites her about science and argues that we must make science a natural career choice for women and girls. Her blog marks International Day of Women and Girls in Science.
Professor Danny McAuley, Director of the Efficacy and Mechanism Evaluation (EME) Programme, writes about how the role of translational research in the journey from scientific discovery through to directly benefiting patients is more visible than ever following the COVID-19 pandemic and how EME is playing a crucial role.
The Kigali Declaration on Neglected Tropical Diseases, launched on 27 January with CMO Sir Chris Whitty and several heads of state, is a major milestone in global health. Professor Gail Davey, Director of the NIHR’s Global Health Research Unit on Neglected Tropical Diseases, and a leading authority on stigmatising skin diseases, argues that the Declaration both embodies the principles of partnership and ownership by low and middle income countries (LMICs), and provides the mechanisms to put these into practice over the next decades.
The insight and input of patients, service users and the public has rightly become a standard part of research. Now research teams must share the reins with public contributors and allow them to take the lead, write Public Contributor Anica Alvarez Nishio and Steven Blackburn, NIHR Research Design Service West Midlands and Keele University’s Public Involvement Lead.
Improving our understanding of how universities can better promote wellbeing and support students is both a research and intervention priority, argues Professor Ed Watkins, Director of the University of Exeter Sir Henry Wellcome Centre for Mood Disorders Research and Professor of Experimental and Applied Clinical Psychology.
