We’re developing our next strategy, which will set out our goals over the coming three years and where we are going to make change happen so that we can meet them.
It is important to understand the progress we have made so far – what has worked well and also what has worked less well and why – to inform the decisions we make. This will ensure that we can learn from this to use our resources in the best way possible going forward to achieve the objective we were set up to do – making it easier to do research that people can trust.
We described our 2022-2025 strategy in four interconnected strategic pillars:
- Include – so that health and social care research is done with and for everyone
- Accelerate – so that research findings improve care faster because the UK is the easiest place in the word to do research that people can trust
- Digital – we will use digital technology well to do our work
- Improve – we will always look for ways to do things better
In this blog, the Directors that led each of these pillars highlight some of the biggest achievements and where we have more to do.
Include
We are increasing the diversity of people and perspectives that inform the decisions we make
We have established the HRA Community Committee which is made up of people who volunteer with us as REC and CAG members and public contributors. The committee directly advises our Board. We have a better understanding of the demographics of the people we currently work with, which we will monitor and report on going forwards. And we have developed our own expertise and built connections with wider networks to work with communities that may have lower levels of confidence in research. This is helping us to better understand how we can change to provide information in a way that anyone can access and understand, work with people effectively and ensure their perspectives inform our work.
We are publishing data showing how health and social care research currently happens to inform and encourage change
To support our work to make transparency the norm for research and increase public involvement in research, we are now publishing data annually to show how well the sector is performing and encourage better practice. Our latest data shows that 92% of clinical trials have registered, or are in the process of being registered. We are now preparing to better show and encourage compliance with our expectation for sponsors to publish results of their studies 12-months after the end of the study. We also found that around three quarters of health and social care studies are telling us that they are involving patients and the public in their research. These analyses provide valuable evidence to inform action that we and others are taking to encourage change.
We better understand what matters to people in research and are using this to inform our work
Our public attitudes research showed 75% of UK adults are confident that they would be treated with dignity and respect if they took part in research. But that also means that a quarter of UK adults are not confident or not sure that they would be treated with dignity and respect. And this number increases for some groups of people. Our work to change this includes developing nine hallmarks of people centred research, working closely with patients and clinicians. We found that there are three things important to people’s decisions over whether to take part in research: trust, purpose and possibility. We are now working to support research to happen in this way, including by developing guidance with MHRA to help researchers improve the diversity of participants in their research.
More to do
We know that we can do more to talk in a way that anyone can access and understand, and show people how we are acting on the issues that matter to them in research. This is informing the goals we are setting in our next strategy.
Director of Policy and PartnershipsBecky Purvis
Accelerate
We’ve sped up the time it takes to set up studies
A focus of our work over the last three years has been to rework processes that slow down how studies get up and running at individual sites. We have been working with partner organisations across the UK including NIHR and NHS England to establish the National Contract Value Review process for commercial research. This reduces unnecessary duplication in the costing of commercial research across the NHS, meaning that the costing and contracting part of set-up activities for a clinical trial or study is now taking 6 instead of 10 months. There is more that we can do to reduce duplication and speed up processes, which is why we are part of the ambitious UK Clinical Research Delivery programme (UKCRD) that is focused on making a faster, more efficient, more accessible and more innovative clinical research delivery system to make the UK a world leader in clinical trials.
We’ve started building new online services to help you make research happen
All researchers use the HRA’s digital services and UK-wide partnership to plan, approve, set-up, manage and complete research in the UK. We are developing new services that will digitise the end-to-end research journey, connecting all of the processes for health and social care research in the UK. The new services will make it faster and easier to start research by streamlining research approvals, reducing inconsistencies and duplication in study set-up and delivery, and lowering the burden on NHS research and development departments. They will also improve research transparency by making better research information public.
We’re working together with our partners to design the new services. They will be introduced in stages, and we expect to be able to start to bring users on board to the first service in development by the end of the year.
We are supporting new ways to do research
To better understand how to support the move of care from hospitals to communities, research needs to take place in those settings. Enabling this type of decentralised research can also help us to do research in more people-centred ways, making it easier for people to take part and be confident in how they will be treated when they do so. We are supporting researchers to work in novel ways in different settings in a way that people can trust. We are also working with other regulators to understand how new technologies, including digital and AI, can be used by researchers in a way that people can trust and are part of the NHS Innovation Service which supports all types of healthcare innovators to develop their product or idea.
More to do
As part of the UK Clinical Research Delivery programme, we are focused on making a faster, more efficient, more accessible and more innovative clinical research delivery system to make the UK a world leader in clinical trials. As part of this we will help realise the Prime Minister’s vision for the time it takes to get a clinical trial set up cut to 150 days by March 2026.
Our work to modernise our digital services will make it faster and easier to do research in the UK that people can trust, ensuring faster patient access to new treatments.
Director of Approvals ServiceJanet Messer,
Digital
We are more digitally mature so that we can be part of modern, digital government
We have grown and developed our digital capability under our current strategy, recruiting new digital expertise and training our existing team on ITIL standards. These are industry standard processes and guidelines so that we can manage our services in the best way to support the HRA to deliver its objectives.
We’ve implemented strong digital practice around service management including incident handling and change management. Our digital services are supported by a number of suppliers, and we have established a core leadership team who regularly meet with suppliers and monitor our contracts to ensure value for money. We challenge our suppliers to make sure technical solutions meet our user needs.
We are making it easier for researchers to use our services
We are implementing a new service management system that will help us to better understand and respond to our users needs. Researchers will be able to get faster answers to their questions as they navigate submitting a research application and we will be able to understand and learn from their experiences to keep improving.
We are more secure
We have made sure that our current systems are fit to continue while we develop the future IRAS system. This has involved significant remediation work. We are also improving our cyber security protection and have made sure that our current services are safe, secure and functional (‘secure by design’) as we develop our new services. This means that researchers can confidently use our services to plan, approve, set-up, manage and complete research in the UK.
More to do
New technologies, including artificial intelligence, offer huge potential for us to provide better, more user-friendly services. We are exploring these as we develop our new services. We are also building data foundations now that will put us in the best position to capitalise on these opportunities in future
Chief Digital Transformation OfficerJulie Waters
Improve
The HRA is a learning organisation
We’ve improved our organisational learning maturity including introducing a 70:20:10 blended learning approach, transforming our digital learning platform, offering an extensive range of management and leadership programmes, and completing a skills gap analysis.
We’ve focused on targeted equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives
We’ve redesigned our recruitment policy and guidance to improve good quality recruitment decisions by minimising the potential for bias, achieving disability confident leader status and introduced our dignity and respect policy, supported by an engaging respect video featuring colleagues and volunteers. This has supported our people to thrive, maintaining high levels of engagement throughout the organisation despite significant organisational change and external uncertainty.
We've also built on our existing practices, including introducing a series of ‘Let’s talk’ sessions.
We’ve developed our core functions to meet public sector standards
Including enhancements in our continuous improvement approach, purchase ordering, project and programme management, counter fraud and commercial disciplines.
We've enhanced and solidified our commitment to sustainability
By delivering on our environmental strategy goals in partnership with our staff-led 'Green Team', including essential reporting and monitoring.
More to do
As part of the work to develop our new strategy we’re creating a more cohesive framework that connects the strategy with capacity and capability planning, business planning and investment decisions.
We’re also planning to update our commercial strategy to reflect the changed regulatory environment and align with the Department of Health and Social Care’s strategy.
During the next strategy period we also plan to refresh other key documents including our People Strategy and our Estates Strategy.
Deputy Chief Executive and Director of FinanceKaren Williams
Developing our new strategy
Work to develop our new strategy is well underway.
We have identified a number of workstreams that cover the work we already know is important to do, like speeding up site set-up and promoting research transparency.
There are also workstreams for areas where there may be new opportunities for us to influence change.
We invited HRA staff, our Community and wider stakeholders to share their thoughts through surveys and meetings. Informed by this feedback, we also held some workshops on specific areas – international working and partnership working.
On 14 March we held a workshop with our staff, members of the HRA community, HRA Board members and stakeholders to share the work we’ve been doing so far and to get feedback on our plans.
Using the feedback we received at the workshop we have moved to final phase of our strategy development - the ‘agree and launch phase’.
To help us make sure that we describe the work we’re planning to do in our strategy in the right way we’re involving members of the public, HRA staff, the HRA community and wider stakeholders to fine tune the wording.
We would like to say a huge thank you to everyone who has been involved in our work to develop our new strategy so far.
The feedback we have received has been invaluable and we are looking forward to launching our new strategy at an online event in July 2025.