This section provides an overview of the Health Research Authority (HRA) and our work. This includes our performance highlights and analysis, providing details of our key activities over the past year delivering our strategy and statutory functions.
Our vision
Our vision is for high-quality health and social care research today that improves everyone’s health and wellbeing tomorrow.
Our purpose
Our purpose is to protect and promote the interests of patients and the public in health and social care research.
Our values
In all our work, we are guided by our organisational values:
- inspiring leadership: enabling people and teams to develop and deliver dynamic, innovative and transformative services and systems
- integrity: being fair, ethical and honest in everything we do
- trusted: being respected for delivering to consistently high standards
- transparent: being accountable and open about all aspects of our work
- collaborative: listening to and working with others to identify and make improvements to the health research environment
- empowering: supporting independent thinking and decision-making
About us
The Health Research Authority is a non-departmental public body, set up in 2011 with a mission to protect NHS patients, adults in social care, your tissue and your data when you are involved in research. We have transformed UK research regulation and governance by simplifying processes, removing duplication and reducing timelines. We have better supported the research community by putting people first.
Our aim is for research findings to improve care faster because the UK is the easiest place in the world to do research that people can trust. To do this, we:
- work with people to understand what you want research to look like, and act on this so that you can trust research
- make sure that people taking part in research are treated ethically and fairly, by reviewing and approving health and social care research studies that involve people, their tissue, or their data
- work with other organisations across the UK to make sure that, wherever you are, research studies can be set up smoothly and are always subject to the same scrutiny before they start
- coordinate and standardise the way research is set up and managed
- encourage and support transparency about research so that you can find out what research is taking place, and what it found
- are one of the gatekeepers of patient data, making sure that your information is protected if it’s used for research
- put in place and support digital services to help research get set-up and managed in the UK
How we work
Our 280 staff, who work at home and in our 4 regional offices, provide approval services to the research community and support over 50 committees and advisory groups. They provide specialist advice and learning to researchers about research ethics and governance, and develop and implement operational policies relating to research approvals.
Our staff work with users of our services to design and put in place the digital services used to set up studies, and to effectively administer the process for review and approval of health and social care research.
We could not operate without our HRA Community of volunteers and public contributors.
The Community is made up of our Research Ethics Committees (REC) members, Confidentiality Advisory Group (CAG) members, and our public contributors, which includes members of the public who have experience of, or have been impacted by, research.
They all make an invaluable contribution to our work and the experience of people taking part in research. They help us make sure that people can trust the research that we approve, so the research findings can improve care. They give their time generously, enabling the HRA to operate efficiently and respond rapidly when needed. It is estimated that our volunteers contribute over 77,000 hours each year to our work, equivalent to 46 full-time members of staff.
To deliver our ambition to make it easier to do research that people can trust and ensure that health and social care research is conducted with and for everyone, it is important that we are informed by a range of insights and experiences that reflect the populations we serve.
We can make better decisions by working with a diverse group of people, and we work with our HRA Community to ensure working with us is a positive experience, open to everyone.
Our strategy: boosting research that improves health and grows the economy
The HRA is part of the health and social care research sector that is focused on improving everyone’s health and wellbeing. This is important because research findings can improve everybody’s care faster if more health and social care research is taking place that a wider diversity of people are confident and able to take part in. Getting this right will improve the health and wellbeing of everybody in the UK and contribute to economic growth.
Our strategy, launched in 2025, builds on our previous strategy, taking the opportunity to align with government-wide missions to make change happen faster. The UK government has set out 5 missions as part of its plan for change. Our work directly supports the missions for health and growth. At the heart of our work are people. People who could benefit from research findings improving their care, helping them to have a better quality of life and play a more active role in society.
The UK government’s health missions set out to address the main underlying drivers of ill-health and tackle persistent inequalities in health to put the NHS on a sustainable footing for the future. Research that has been done with and for everyone so that the whole population can benefit from its findings will be key to doing this well. This is why our work to ensure that research is done in a way that people can trust and includes everyone is important to build a health service fit for the future.
Our strategic objectives
- The UK is the easiest place in the world to do excellent health and social care research that people can trust, helping grow the contribution of life sciences to our economy
- Health and social care research is done with and for everyone, meaning that we can all benefit from research findings, helping reduce health inequalities
- The health and social care research system is streamlined, efficient and encourages and supports success, increasing the impact of investment
We know that we need to be a trusted, effective organisation that makes it simple and fast to do research well. In our strategy, we have set out how you will see us work in this way, with measurable outcomes.
There are 4 areas where you will see the biggest change. These are where we can make impactful change fastest to support government objectives. These are:
- we are part of modern, digital government. We will build our digital foundations as part of the vision for modern, digital government
- we are efficient and take action to increase productivity. We will embed productivity into everything we do, guiding our decision-making
- we give approvals and assurances, working in partnership UK-wide to provide a world-class regulatory system. We are focused on reducing the burden, time and cost to do research with and for everyone
- anyone can understand what we do and why it matters to them and be confident in our decisions. We will build the profile that we need to achieve