Promoting a research-active culture in your organisation is a requirement of both the NHS Long Term Plan and the CQC Well-Led Framework. To fulfill the expectations of both, your organisation must demonstrate that you:

• • Enable staff to deliver research

  • Promote research participation across patients and carers

  • Involve patients and carers in your research initiatives

The Research Champions initiative has been designed to help you evidence that you are promoting a research-active culture.

NHS Long Term Plan

• The NHS Long Term Plan reinforces NHS England’s long term commitment to integrating research into health and social care, in order to drive improvement and innovation. NHS England intends to ensure one million people are registered to participate in health research by 2023/24 and will be using digital platforms to help patients and the public find out and register for research (NHS Long Term Plan, 3.112, 2018). This means more patients and carers than ever will be expecting their health and social care provides to be ready to answer their questions about clinical research and support their active involvement in research.

• The Research Champions initiative can support you in embedding this research-active culture in your organisation. By supporting you to recruit and train volunteers who can help patients and carers understand clinical research and put themselves forward to participate.

Care Quality Commission (CQC)

• The Care Quality Commission recognises that a research-active culture is a key identicator of high quality leadership in health and social care organisations. It assesses the extent to which such a culture is promoted through two mechanisms: the well-led framework, introduced in 2019, and the Inpatient Survey.

• The Well-Led Framework (NHS Trusts) expects that there are: robust systems and processes for learning, continuous improvement and innovation within health and social care NHS Trusts. This will be assessed in inspections through review of the extent to which staff are participating in the delivery of research and the extent to which patients and carers are aware of opportunities to engage in clinical research. In addition, the CQC Inpatient Survey asks respondents ‘During this hospital stay, did anyone discuss with you whether you would like to take part in a research study?’ Research Champions can support with the promotion of research to patients in order to fulfill this expectation.