Today i'm delighted to announce the NIHR Clinical Research Network's
annual activity research data for the last financial year.
But firstly I want to say a huge thank you to everyone who's been involved: from the hundreds
and thousands of participants throughout the country, to our NHS staff, academics, sponsors,
funders, our research delivery teams, and everyone who's contributed to this. Your
involvement in research is helping to bring the very best evidence and treatments that we need
in this country for our health and well-being, and I really thank you for your involvement.
The scale of participation in CRN-supported research has again exceeded all expectations,
with support contributing to over 4,900 studies,
recruiting over 1.4 million people across the UK. This also demonstrates the strength and
breadth of R&D leadership and involvement across all our health and care settings.
For the fifth year in succession, every NHS Trust has taken part in research and recruited patients
into research. It's becoming normal practice, embedding research now throughout the NHS.
And our engagement with Primary Care is better than ever, with 51 percent of GP practices getting
involved in research - again, a really great improvement. And what this shows is that even
at a time of the NHS being under such pressure, research is important to the NHS and its staff
in delivering evidence about the best treatments of use at this particular time.
I this last year we placed a special emphasis in helping the life sciences industries recover
from the impact of Covid on their work and investment in UK health research.
And over 28,000 participants were recruited into life sciences and med-tech studies
-which is good - and there are signs of recovery,
but we need to continue the focus on this work and do much more to help them recover their position,
so that UK continues to be a world leading partner for life sciences research.
Over much of the last year we've had to cope with the ongoing Covid pandemic,
and have supported the recruitment of 770,000 people to Covid studies, including some of
the vital vaccine licensing studies as well as vaccine studies that defined booster intervals,
and more recently we focused on the Covid antiviral studies in the PANORMIC study, which is
the largest community-based antiviral study in the world - not only the largest in the world,
but the fastest primary care interventional study in the UK to date, recruiting over 25,000 people
in five months - an incredible partnership between the University of Oxford trial team, NIHR, NHSE,
the GP hubs that supported recruitment, and of course all the people who took part.
As part of our work to recover the non-Covid research,
we supported the Managed Recovery process over the last year, working with sponsors and funders
to identify their most urgent multi-center research studies to deliver in that period.
And considerable success has been achieved by that initiative, but it only addressed a small number
of studies across the portfolio and the truth is that the NHS remains under unprecedented pressure.
It's going to take time, and there is much more focus that we need to give to this.
Over the coming year, we want to work with all our health and care research partners to
build back a thriving, diverse and reliable portfolio of research for the UK, so we are
actively supporting the Research Reset program led by DHSC and NHSE to achieve a system-wide
approach on helping to restore our research to become world-leading across all our specialties.
I really want to thank you for all the work, the involvement and the contribution you've made
to supporting health and care research in the last year.
There is much, much more to do and more focus on our recovery and building back
a great portfolio of work for the future, but we should now take a moment to be really proud
of what everyone has achieved for the benefit and health of us all. Thank you.