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New guiding principles for community engagement and involvement in global health research

  • 06 August 2024
  • 2 min read

The NIHR has launched its new Guiding Principles for Community Engagement and Involvement (CEI) in Global Health Research.

The NIHR is committed to equality, diversity, and inclusion in everything it does. Diverse people and communities shape its research. The organisation strives to make opportunities to participate in research an integral part of everyone's experience of health and social care.

The NIHR's vision is that all global health research is undertaken in collaboration with the communities who are most likely affected by the research outcomes. It wants those who are marginalised to have a meaningful voice in the full range of the research.

The new principles

The new guiding principles aim to clarify the NIHR’s expectations of CEI. They provide stronger guidance for researchers in developing CEI plans. The principles will help to ensure these plans are robust, appropriate and effective for the local context and community needs. They will also help to inform the study design.

The principles will help the research community to develop, deliver and evaluate CEI. The principles will also be used to help assess research proposals. They are not a set of rules but a values-based tool. While not prescriptive, they aim to provide a conceptual framework from which CEI can be realised practically. They also reflect the huge contextual variation in global health research.

How they were produced

The principles were co-produced based on the experience of CEI practitioners and academics. Evidence from published literature was also incorporated. This helped to identify CEI principles related to how researchers and communities interact in global health research.

Feedback on the emerging principles was sought from a group of CEI Leads across NIHR research projects. The principles were then refined with an independent group of CEI experts. Finally, a public consultation survey built further consensus on the principles.

Currently, selected NIHR researchers are piloting the principles. Once the pilots are complete, short case studies of how these principles can work in practice will be published in 2025.

The NIHR recognises that these guiding principles are not static. They are expected to evolve over time as they are applied in various settings, and as new insights emerge from ongoing research and practice.

NIHR Programme Director for Global Health Research Professor Kara Hanson said: “The NIHR global health research programme has been an active champion of inclusive and meaningful community engagement and involvement (CEI) as a means of ensuring that research meets the priorities and needs of communities in low-and-middle-income countries. Through these guiding principles, we aim to strengthen CEI practices, supporting researchers to take a reflective approach to working with people and communities throughout the whole research life cycle.

"We want the voices of those who are most commonly marginalised and underrepresented in research to be equitably involved, valued and respected, ultimately enhancing the impact of the research we fund.”

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