Ensuring the way we include who is involved in research is fair and scientifically robust

For many reasons, health research participants (people taking part in research) often do not reflect the people who need treatments in terms such as age, gender, or ethnicity. When groups are left out of research over and over again, research findings may not apply to or benefit them. Those left out of research are often those already with poorer health compared to other groups. Continuing to exclude people can mean that the gap between people benefiting from research and those who do not will increase. 

We developed a toolkit (called REP-EQUITY) so that researchers can: 

• decide who they should include in their research, so it is fair,  

• consider the health gap impact between groups, 

• consider why they want to include particular groups, which will help them explain this to potential participants. This could help build trust between researchers and those groups who are often left out of research.   

The toolkit we have developed has been adopted by National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Research Inclusion, forming part of the research inclusion tools referred to by NIHR for use by researchers in development of their grant proposals. It has also been adopted by the NIHR Applied Research Collaboration West Midlands, the wider NIHR Birmingham Biomedical Research Centre teams, and by Wellcome Sanger in its Representative Research strategy.