Shaping the HRA strategy workshop

Earlier this month, we came together with our staff, members of the HRA community, HRA Board members and stakeholders at our Shaping the HRA Strategy workshop.

We held the workshop to share the work we’ve been doing to develop the new HRA strategy, and to get feedback on our plans.

The event, which was hosted by our Chief Executive, Matt Westmore, and took place online and in person at our London office and was attended by more than 100 people.

Our new strategy, which we’re planning to launch this summer, will set out what we want to achieve over the next three years.

This strategy will also make sure we use our resources in the best way possible to achieve the objectives we were set up to do.

How we've been engaging about our strategy

In her blog from December, Becky Purvis, HRA Director of Policy and Partnerships, shared how we are developing our new strategy with our stakeholders.

Over the past few months, we have invited people to share their thoughts.

We have conducted surveys with our staff, HRA community of REC and CAG members and public contributors who work with us and wider stakeholders to get their input on what we should continue doing, and what new or emerging areas the HRA should focus on in our new strategy.

We’ve also been out and about to hear what people think.

Our strategy workshop

On 14 March, we shared key themes from what we are hearing and showed how these are informing our approach.

We also tested our ideas around emerging and more complex themes, including:

• How can the HRA best support growth in UK life sciences and encourage safe and ethical research that you can trust? what the HRA can do to maximise the impact of money invested in health and social care research
• who does the HRA need to be visible to, to achieve our strategic objectives
• future developments to the Integrated Research Application System, the system used for applying for the permissions and approvals for health, social and community care research in the UK

We received lots of helpful feedback including some challenges and suggestions for how to do things differently. These included:

• a strong emphasis on the importance of equality and inclusion in research and our role in breaking down barriers to research
• our role in building trust in the use of data and AI in research
• going further to streamline the research ethics approval process, including the role of system-wide influencing so that applications are more likely to meet expectations first time
• Introducing more proportionality to our approach

There was agreement that the HRA has an important role to play, but we need to think carefully about how and where we focus our efforts to achieve our objectives.

Next steps

We are using all the information that we have received to inform the strategy.

Thank you to everyone who attended our workshop and who has contributed to our strategy development work so far.

We will also be involving members of the public in the final stage of our strategy development, including finalising the content and supporting with our launch event.

It is very important to us to recognise and acknowledge the time that you have taken to inform our work and show you the difference it has made. When the strategy is launched in the summer, we will share an overview of the feedback that we received and what we did as a result.