Equality, diversity and inclusion

Health and Care Research Wales is committed to equality, diversity, and inclusion across all our activities.

The Health and Care Research Wales plan 2022-25 sets out ambitions and actions over the three years to improve health and social care research in Wales. Equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI) is a cross-cutting theme in our plan which means that embracing diverse people and communities is at the heart of all our activities underway. Recognising our diverse population helps to produce meaningful and impactful research for all. Embedding EDI in our activities is necessary to provide a space for everyone to flourish and succeed.

As a funder, Health and Care Research Wales strives to create and maintain a culture where everyone feels included and valued, and where they can participate in, contribute to, and benefit from our investments in research.

Hence, we are creating an EDI action plan that will set out our activities across six themes – inclusive organisation, inclusive research funding, inclusive participation and engagement, inclusive community, evidence-based inclusion, and impact for all.

As our action plan evolves, we will be aligning it to the Anti-racist Wales Action Plan which sets a vision for 2030 - to make a measurable change to the lives of ethnic minority people by tackling racism. In relation to sex and gender, where appropriate, we will look to align with the recommendations of the MESSAGE (Medical Science Sex and Gender Equity) initiative, as well and learn from good practice across the funder community.

Here are some examples of work currently underway:

• We help researchers to develop inclusive public involvement opportunities in their research groups or individual research projects, including advising on design of activities and facilitating contact with appropriate networks and community groups.
• When EDI has been identified as a priority area for our funding calls, we fast track applications that focus on EDI issues to the next application stage.
• With our funded Research Centres and Units, we expect EDI to be addressed in their activities and across their work programmes to ensure they consider the relevance of, and impact of their work on, groups with protected characteristics.
• In 2024, we will be running a research prioritisation exercise on a topic within Women's Health. The purpose of these exercises is to identify and promote priority research topics to funders and the research community by listening to the voices of people with lived experiences and practitioners.
• We work with national and international funders to share, learn, and adopt best practice of evidence-based EDI mechanisms to improve the inclusivity of our work and that of our funded researchers.
• We routinely collect EDI monitoring data from all applicants, to help us track the number of research funding applications received from people who identify with under-served groups.