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If you would like to find out more about or new strategy or get involved in workshops or events you can sign up to receive email updates below.
Over the last three years our work has been guided by our strategy, ‘making it easy to do research that people can trust’.
Our current strategy was written to last three years, and now we’re planning a new strategy, starting in 2025, which will set out what we are going to do to deliver our mission over the next three years.
Why does the HRA need a new strategy?
We were created 13 years ago to protect participants and potential participants in health and social care research, to promote their interests, and to support and improve transparency in research.
Some of our work to do this is set out in law. This includes establishing and supporting Research Ethics Committees (RECs) in England, setting policy for how RECs operate across the UK, and co-ordinating and standardising research.
We also do things that are not set out in law, but help us deliver our objectives, like running IRAS - the service used by researchers to apply for the permissions and approvals to carry out health, social and community care studies in the UK - and our Make it Public strategy for research transparency.
These are strategic decisions that we have made about how we are going to deliver our mission. We need to make sure we use our resources in the best way possible to carry out this work and achieve the objectives we were set up to do.
That is why we write a strategy. It helps us agree our goals for the coming three years, and what we’re going to do to make change happen so that we can meet them.
How are we developing our new strategy?
We’ve set up a project board to help us drive forward the new strategy. The board is made up of a passionate and knowledgeable group of people including staff from across the organisation, one of our non-executive directors, Neelam Patel, and two members of our Community Committee.
We know that we want to be clear about what we are going to do and what we are not going to do with the resources we have, so that we can make a real difference. We want to involve our staff, the HRA Community and stakeholders across the research system that we are part of to make sure the strategy is representative of the brilliant people who will help us deliver it and will address the issues that matter the most to make it easier to do research that people can trust. We also want to develop clear ways to measure and demonstrate the progress of our strategy.
When we developed our current strategy we involved patients, service users, carers and other members of the public to help us to shape how we talk about our work and why it matters, and we know we want to do this again.
Involving you
We're currently in the ‘discovery’ phase of the strategy development. This involves collecting suggestions from our staff and the HRA Community and wider stakeholders. We are also establishing a number of workstreams to look in more detail at specific areas that we know are important.
These workstreams include areas where we have established work already that we know is important to our mission, like ‘promote research transparency’ or ‘speed up study set up’ and the next steps towards developing our research systems.
This word cloud shows work we're already doing but might do differently.
The workstreams also include thinking about what our role may be in areas where our work is currently less developed, such as encouraging more sustainable research to deliver net zero.
Some of the things we’re thinking about are in this word cloud.
We'll use the information we gather from the workstreams to start developing the strategy. We'll then test these ideas, including engaging widely with the organisations and people we work with.
Your help to inform our strategic goals
We would like your help! We will soon be sharing a link to a short survey, where you can give us your feedback and share your thoughts on our work.
What’s the most important thing that should be front and centre of our new strategy? What could we do more of, or less of? Or what could be done differently? We won’t be able to do everything that you suggest, but everything that you share will inform our approach.
We will share an overview of what we hear in February.
We’d also like to invite a group of people to a workshop in March where we will test our ideas. Look out for more information on this in the new year.
Our final strategy will be launched this next summer, setting out what we will do and what we want to accomplish from 2025 to 2028.
By Becky Purvis, Director of Policy and Partnerships