Reviewed: October 2022
AMRC works to support our members to consider and include Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) across your research funding. This includes:
We also work with other organisations - gathering knowledge, sharing it, and advocating on behalf of our members to influence the wider research ecosystem to do more and better.
There are many definitions but for the purposes of our work when we refer to EDI we mean:
Equity is recognising that each person has different circumstances and allocating the exact resources needed to reach an equal outcome.
Diversity is considering and appreciating all the unique characteristics that make people who they are.
Inclusion is creating and maintaining a culture where people feel welcomed and valued for who they are as an individual or group.
Improving EDI isn't simply a moral obligation or a 'nice to have'. Getting it right or taking steps to get it as right as you can is essential, everyone benefits - most of all people affected by life limiting or life shortening conditions. The findings of research and any resulting health benefits must be delivered through an EDI lens. This ensures the research is valid for all, preventing waste and making it much more applicable to the real world.
If a sample used in research – whether animal model, human tissue, or real live people – is poorly selected, it reduces the broad applicability of the results. We want to make sure that researchers take the data they need to do their research from a small, but representative selection so that when the results are generalised across the larger patient population, they are more valid.
Characteristics such as age, sex and ethnicity can play a significant role in how effective a treatment could be or how safe it may be for an individual, yet studies rarely address all these factors. There is a large body of research to suggest that many population groups that are under-represented in health research often disproportionately suffer from adverse health outcomes.
A study carried out by NIHR (the National Institute for Health Research) showed that clinical trial recruitment in England didn’t reflect the geographical and demographic areas of prevalence of the condition being researched.
Increased diversity in trial recruitment will result in better treatments, better results for patients and of course will have other benefits for clinical research itself including faster and less expensive trials.
We know there is much more to be done and would love to hear from you about what we can do to help or improve our own inputs to EDI.
If you have any questions about this topic, contact our Policy Team ([email protected]), for more information.
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