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The CRN enables high-quality health and care research in England by meeting the costs of additional staff, facilities, equipment and support services so that research is not subsidised with funding that has been provided for health and care treatments and service. The CRN also provides a vast range of national and local resources and activities that support health and care organisations, staff, and patients and service users to be research active, such as specialist training, information systems to manage and report research, patient and public involvement and engagement initiatives, and communications expertise.
Delivering studies ‘to plan’ - meaning within the planned timescale and with the right number of participants to make the results meaningful - is of critical importance, which is why the CRN provides the Study Support Service. This helps researchers and the life sciences industry plan, set up and deliver high-quality research in both the NHS and the wider health and social care environment across England. We provide this service for all studies eligible for our support, regardless of location, study type, study size, therapy or research area. Whether your study is medical, diagnostic, pharmaceutical, bio-tech or is looking at healthy populations or people with social care needs, we can help.
The CRN supported 6,052 studies and recruited over 732,000 participants in 2019/2020.
Find out more about our performance and key statistics relating to our activity.
The NIHR CRN meets the costs of around 10,000 NHS staff delivering research in NHS organisations - that is, people working in research sites as part of the Principal Investigator's (PI) team.
We also provide specialist training to anyone delivering research in the NHS so that patients can be confident that research is being delivered by trained, experienced front-line staff.
We help cover the costs of using NHS facilities, such as scanners and x-rays that are needed in the course of a study, so that research is not subsidised with funding that has been provided for patient care.
We provide practical help in identifying and recruiting patients for Portfolio studies, so that researchers can be confident of completing the study on time and as planned.
We undertake projects to help make the clinical research pathway more efficient, and to make research easier to deliver.
The NIHR CRN also has a broader core role. Our networked structure empowers us to:
provide globally unique, nationwide support for researchers enabling them to identify sites efficiently and set-up and deliver clinical research for the benefit of NHS patients
enable collective sharing of good practice across the country for all staff involved in delivering research so they can learn from the expertise of others through our networked structure. This speeds up innovation in everyday treatment and care.
This is truly a team effort. The NIHR CRN is made up of a national Coordinating Centre and 15 Local Clinical Research Networks that cover the length and breadth of England. We deliver research across 31 clinical specialties and have clinical specialists working at a national and local level to support them. Our people are at the 'coal face' supporting research participants and researchers, and in the background working to make sure studies can be delivered quickly and efficiently. We are all enabled by essential support staff, who keep everything running smoothly.
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