Medicine: Research
The question
To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, whether he has considered using geographical location of host organisations as a formal tie-breaker where competing research applications to the National Institute for Health and Care Research are assessed as being of equal quality.
Answered by Preet Kaur Gill
The Department funds health and care research via its research operational arm the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) across England. The Department is committed to ensuring that research is inclusive and representative of the population geographically and demographically. Inclusion is one of the top four priorities for the NIHR, reported against publicly in the NIHR Annual Report.
From November 2024, the Department made inclusion a condition of NIHR funding for all domestic research awards. All applicants must demonstrate how their research will address existing inequalities, including place-based inequalities, in health and social care, and researchers will be held to account for delivering on their plans.
The NIHR’s funding committees prioritise research that addresses the most important health and care evidence gaps, with strong potential for impact, and also consider scientific excellence and value for money. The Department has not considered using geographical location of host institutions as a tie-breaker in research competitions, but through the NIHR it is taking a number of other steps to secure equitable allocation of health research funding. These include targeted programme design, place‑based research partnerships, and long‑term capacity building in under‑served regions, such as the regional Commercial Research Delivery Centres across England, including in Yorkshire and across the north of England. More information about the services and support for the life sciences industry that the NIHR offers is available at the following link:
https://www.nihr.ac.uk/support-and-services/industry/explore
For the NIHR personal career development awards, applications covering certain themes such as topic, setting, or profession, are prioritised where more applications are considered fundable than there is budget available, and in this way a recent round of senior investigator awards prioritised applicants hosted by organisations based outside of the Greater South East.
In addition, in April this year the NIHR’s Research Delivery Network, which supports all National Health Service trusts in England to deliver research, implemented a new national funding allocation model for NHS support costs and research delivery which will reduce regional variations in health research delivery investment. More information on the new funding allocation model is available at the following link:
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