We are proud of our work and continuously innovate in order to deliver against our mission of improving the health and wealth of the nation through research. Alongside the work to deliver our core workstreams, we have identified areas where the environment is changing and where we need to work with urgency and in markedly different ways if we are to tackle the health and social challenges facing people and communities today.
In these areas of strategic focus, we aim to deliver transformative change over the next five to ten years and will be sharing information on the work we are doing in each of these areas to help deliver this.
NIHR continues to fund and support research to tackle the ongoing threat from COVID-19.
We must ensure the research system is ready to tackle future pandemics and other global health challenges.
We must help the health and social care system to recover, restore services and become more resilient.
We must apply learnings from COVID-19, integrating research into services and accelerating our processes.
Preventing ill health and improving public health and social care are difficult and important challenges.
We are working to build up research capacity, particularly in local authorities as they can affect the wider determinants of health.
We must draw in new communities of researchers, including those working in areas of deprivation.
We must research how to reach populations with the poorest health and encourage them to engage with preventative services.
We must increase our focus on obesity, mental health and dementia research, working in partnership with others.
More than 14 million people in England are living with two or more chronic conditions, but their needs are not well served by clinical services or science.
We must reduce inequalities in the type of research we fund, who we fund and our decision-making processes.
We must diversify research participants in the studies we support and the voices of those who shape our research agenda.
We must systematically track, report and evaluate diversity within NIHR and use these data to set appropriate targets.
There are groups in our research community that lack recognition and career support including nurses, midwives, clinical research practitioners and methodologists.
We have introduced programmes to invest in their skills and provide advancement opportunities, and we actively promote ‘team science’.
We must build capacity across disciplines and in statistics, data science, economics, behavioural and social sciences.
We must engage clinicians in research and attract research-qualified full-time clinicians back into research.
We must make academic career pathways attractive for nurses, midwives and allied health professionals who often lack advancement into senior research posts.
We are determined to maintain and grow the UK’s share of the international clinical trials market and to be at the forefront of new technologies.
We have established Patient Recruitment Centres for late-phase trials and encouraged links between industry, academia and the health and care sector.
We must develop and promote a pan-NIHR offer for companies large and small across biopharma, diagnostics and medtech.
We must deepen our engagement with nascent industries such as artificial intelligence, digital health and design and help to develop new industries.
We must support the development of life science clusters across the country, stimulating internal investment and the rapid growth of home-grown SMEs.
