Make It Public – new strategy marks step-change in making health research findings available to the public

The Health Research Authority has launched a new strategy to ensure information about all health and social care research – including COVID-19 research - is made publicly available to benefit patients, researchers and policy makers.

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the importance of sharing details of research taking place - to understand the virus and find the tests, treatments and vaccines - so that results can inform best quality care and preventive measures. This also means researchers do not duplicate efforts and can build on each other’s work while the public can see what research is going on. Now the new Make it Public strategy aims to build on this good practice and make it easy for researchers to be transparent about their work.

The strategy, delivered by the HRA in partnership with NHS Research Scotland (NRS), Health and Care Research Wales and Health and Social Care Northern Ireland, is about making transparency ‘the norm’ in research and making information more visible to the public. New measures set out in the strategy – will improve transparency and openness in health and social care studies, by:

• expecting researchers to plan how they will let research participants know about the findings of the study from the beginning
• introducing additional monitoring to check that researchers are reporting results and to collect information about study findings
• making information on individual research projects – and their transparency performance - available to the public
• introducing a system to consider past transparency performance when reviewing new studies for approval and in the future introducing sanctions.