The National Institute of Health and Care Research (NIHR) are funded by the government to deliver and fund research that improve people’s health and wellbeing.
Health and care research is important, as it aims to support services and treatments through evidence of what works.
Healthwarch Blackpool, alongside the Headstart Resilience Revolution and Boing Boing have been working with community champions on a new project called Research Ready Communities. The project is a pilot that has been running in three parts of England.
What is the research ready communities pilot?
Before now, most of the health and care research that NIHR has supported and funded has focused on more clinical settings – like in hospitals, running treatment trials or focused on working with people who have specific medical training.
They have recognised that there is a need to carry out research on and with communities – this is where this pilot comes in!
Feedback from the NIHR:
“The NIHR Research Ready Programme is an innovative programme looking to place local people at the forefront of how the NIHR plans and delivers research. The aim of the programme is to use research to narrow the health inequality gap at a community level. Healthwatch Blackpool have been an integral partner from the very start of the pilot programme and the success of the pilot has now led to a national roll-out and is bringing about positive change for how the NIHR and communities co-produce research. None of this would have been possible without the insight, experience and community relationships that Healthwatch Blackpool have brought to the table.”
Greg Woodley, Regional Communications Lead, NIHR
The NIHR Research Ready Communities pilot ran in three local authorities in the UK hoping to create
a blueprint for researchers to follow to engage communities in the co-production of research that
that impacts their health.
Community voices and perspectives can often get missed out of research and decision making, so the NIHR
embarked on their Research Ready Communities pilot to learn from approaches in different communities.
As part of phase #1 of the Blackpool pilot, we created the “Top tips on co-production” because we hope
for others to learn from our experiences & to give people an understanding of what co-production
is, in order to encourage others to work in that way.
We will focus our co-produced piece of research on mental health, since we know this is a prominent
issue affecting the Blackpool community. We will hopefully be undertaking this research in phase #2,
which we are currently co-producing the funding bid for.
