Everybody should benefit from the advancements in care and treatments made through research with no one, or no group, unfairly excluded. This is only possible if research reflects the diversity of the people it is intended to serve.
The UK population is made up of a wide range of communities, groups, and individuals from different backgrounds. To ensure that the whole population can benefit from research, there needs to be an understanding of how interventions work on different groups of people. Including a range of people in research provides an understanding of the safety and effectiveness of drugs, devices and information about an illness or condition across different groups.
All members of the research team should consider how they can ensure that those who have the potential to be impacted by the research, including people from underserved groups, are given the opportunity to take part. Involving people who the research is for and about in the design stage, will help ensure that the research is more inclusive.
One of the HRA's strategic objectives is that health and social care research is done with and for everyone, meaning that we can all benefit from research findings, helping reduce health inequalities.
Joint HRA and MHRA guidance for developing an inclusion and diversity plan
Including the right people in research needs to be considered from the start of the research process, from inception through to study design. To support this, we have developed guidance with the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) on how to develop an Inclusion and Diversity Plan (Plan).
Developing a Plan using the set of questions in the guidance will help researchers consider and demonstrate how their research is designed to include people who could be impacted by the findings, and that people underserved by research are not overlooked.
We worked closely with a group of researchers, public contributors, and individuals from industry, research funding organisations, and Research Ethics Committees to develop the Inclusion and Diversity Plan guidance. In 2025 we published a draft of the guidance, which was trialled in a pilot with researchers and sponsors. The guidance was updated in response to the pilot findings.
People-Centred Clinical Research
In August 2024 we published a report titled 'Addressing the barriers to people-centred clinical research with recommendations for system-wide action'.
The report identified the hallmarks of good people-centred research and the barriers to doing it.
We made 19 recommendations for system-wide action and asked the research community to use the report to help them make improvements to any research they carry out in the future.
UK Clinical Research Inclusion Group
The UK Clinical Research Inclusion Group was established by the UK Clinical Research Delivery (UKCRD) programme to coordinate work to support greater access to, and inclusion in, clinical research. The UK Clinical Research Inclusion Group will help deliver one of the UKCRD programme aims to ‘reduce inequalities through research inclusion towards a fairer Britain’
Medical Science Sex and Gender Equity (MESSAGE)
We've joined organisations across the UK medical research sector to support the development of policy and practice which sees sex and gender fully accounted for in UK biomedical, health and care research.
Sex and gender influence the medical conditions people develop, the symptoms they experience, the treatments and quality of care they receive, their disease progression and their overall outcomes. The UK currently has no standard, unified guidance for researchers about how adequately to consider sex dimensions in cell and animal studies, and sex and gender dimensions in human studies.
This is why the HRA is working with the Medical Science Sex and Gender Equity (MESSAGE) project: a collaborative cross-sector policy initiative to cement future practices that produce rigorous, sustainable science to reduce health inequalities.
Sex and gender consideration is a key aspect of the Inclusion and Diversity Plan we're developing with the MHRA.