The creation of the Health Research Authority put responsibility for research ethics approval and facilitating and promoting research together, with a remit to facilitate, co-ordinate, standardise and ensure a proportionate approach.
Health and social care research helps us to better understand conditions and develop new treatments. Some projects take place in a lab, others are in hospitals, GP surgeries and social care settings, involving people, their tissue and their data.
People choosing whether to take part in research must be able to have confidence that their interests are being protected and promoted. To do this, research projects involving people, their tissue or their data need a number of approvals before they can go ahead.
Back in 2011 this was a frustrating and time-consuming process. Researchers needed to make multiple applications to different organisations, leading to duplication, inconsistencies and delays to getting their research up and running.
Research applications
Over half of research applications to the HRA take place in multiple places, ranging from 2 to over 300.
This situation did not help to increase the volume of high-quality health and social care research in the UK that people could have confidence in.
Improvements were being made. Much work was done in the early 2000s to create a National Research Ethics Service that could provide a single UK-wide ethics opinion on a research project. But in 2011 it was still challenging to get research projects off the ground.
Academy of Medical Sciences (2011) A new pathway for the regulation and governance of health research'A complex and bureaucratic regulatory environment is stifling health research in the UK…there is no evidence that these measures have enhanced the safety and well-being of either patients or the public.'
There was a feeling that a streamlined system could help us do more, better research with the safety and well-being of the people taking part at its heart. The Academy of Medical Sciences recommended the creation of a ‘Health Research Agency’.
Within a year, the Health Research Authority came into being. This for the first time brought together the responsibility for research ethics approval and facilitating and promoting research in one organisation.
Since then, the Confidentiality Advisory Group has been established to provide independent expert advice on whether applications to access patient information without consent should or should not be approved – a function that was previously outside the HRA. The social care Research Ethics Committee also became part of the HRA.