Our areas of strategic focus

• Through studies funded or supported by NIHR, the UK is at the forefront of the COVID-19 research effort.
• 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.

Read more about our response to COVID-19.

• 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.

Find out more about our work in social care research.

• 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 have published a strategic framework for multiple long-term conditions (MLTC) research and are funding research to map common clusters of disease using artificial intelligence..
• We must ensure all our processes and committee members accommodate and actively support MLTC applications.
• We must provide and promote MLTC research opportunities and encourage researchers to collaborate across disciplines and disease areas.
• We must deliver research that enables the health and social care system to reconfigure services, taking a whole person approach.

Read more about our work in multiple long-term condition research.

• People in regions and communities where the burden of need is greatest are often under-served by health and social care research.
• We have developed a framework which identifies opportunities along the research pathway for improving inclusion of these people.
• We must encourage and enable investigators to extend the reach of their research beyond local ‘tried and trusted’ research sites.
• We must build the research capacity and capabilities of healthcare professionals and researchers in under-served regions.
• We must engage communities in under-served regions in dialogue about research, building long-term relationships with community leaders.

Find out more about our under-served communities programme of work.

• We are committed to equality, diversity and inclusion but know we must do more to embed it in all our ways of working.
• We have reduced barriers to career progression for female academics and developed a framework to encourage ethnic minority participation in clinical trials.
• 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.

Explore our EDI work and read our EDI strategy.

• 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.