Diversity and inclusion survey

Why are you asking for this information?

The HRA’s strategy sets out to include, so that health and social care research is done with and for everyone. An important part of this is to ensure that the HRA makes better decisions by working with a diverse group of people. And making sure that everyone who wants to can get involved.

In 2021 and 2022 we collected demographic data of our community members as part of our community survey. We received responses from 42% (2021) and 22% (2022) of those who were surveyed. This told us that we were not working with and hearing from many younger people, or people from African, Caribbean, and Arab ethnicities. You can see the report on the community demographic page on our website.

We are asking you to fill in this survey to help us get an even better understanding of the diversity of our community members. We plan to repeat this survey every two years but we will review this in the future.

What will we do differently as a result?

We have used the findings of the 2021 and 2022 surveys to develop an action plan with our Community Insight Group. You can read about this on our Community Insight Group page on our website.

The findings from this diversity and inclusion survey will help us to build on this action plan and develop a more tailored approach to reach out to, communicate with, and involve those who are less well-represented in our community. It will also give us a benchmark from which we can monitor whether our actions lead to change, so that our community members better reflect the society that we serve.

How will you look after my information?

All returns are anonymous and the data will be stored on a secure database in a secure location. A summary report will be produced, which will only report on the percentage of individual characteristics (for example, 45% male). We will bring together individual characteristics where the percentage is below 5% (for example, 12% any other religion or belief which brings together religion or belief categories with responses below 5%).

We will not report on combination of characteristics, known as intersectionality, as this risks identifying people (for example we would not report on the proportion of female, Asian, aged 45 to 55).

How did you decide which information to collect and which questions to ask?

It wasn’t an easy process as we needed to make decisions over what information would be helpful and appropriate to gather, provide options that reflected everyone and ensure that it was easy to answer. We started out with a version based on the Diversity and Inclusion Survey (DAISY) Question Guidance (Version 2) which was developed by EDIS (Equality, Diversity and Inclusion in Science and Health) and the Wellcome Trust.

We also looked at census questions used by the Office of National Statistics. We compared these with questions asked by organisations such as the National Institute for Health and Care Research and the Academy of Medical Sciences. We also discussed the questions with members of our Community Insight Group and People Centred Clinical Research steering group.

Using all this information, we finalised the choice and phrasing of questions. We intend to use this question set going forward whenever we collect demographic information from our community members and people who attend our meetings and events.