Health researchers still have time to register for an online seminar which will show them how to improve diversity in study data.
Places are still available for the webinar taking place on Thursday, December 14, focused on how to go about making an Equality Impact Assessment (EqIA) in research a reality.
The online meeting has been organised by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) East Midlands and Centre for Ethnic Health Research. It is part of the ‘Equality in Research Matters’ campaign to promote inclusivity in health and social care research.
The NIHR will soon be requiring researchers to carry out an EqIA for every study and this online seminar will build on a previous seminar on why Equality Impact Assessments are needed on all research activity.
Equality and Diversity Consultant Julian Harrison will talk about how EqIAs can help an organisation to become more accountable, inclusive and community orientated, while allowing it to meet legal duties.
Christine Smith, PPI Lead for NIHR ARC Yorkshire and Humber and a freelance PPI consultant, will cover how public partnerships, including engagement and involvement, are a mechanism for increasing equality, diversity and inclusion.
Professor Marion Walker MBE, ARC East Midlands Collaboration Lead and Chair of the EDI Committee will chair the online meeting. She said: “Excellent health and social care research-intensive organisations have a responsibility to ensure that research produced is designed in a way that gathers data from as diverse and inclusive a population as possible thereby producing results that are genuinely applicable to the wider population.
“ARC East Midlands is committed to embedding consideration of the needs of people who share the protected characteristics and others into its research, evaluation and review work. This will help to ensure that research meets the health needs of our diverse communities.”
An EqIA is an approach designed to improve equality analysis, practice and outcomes. It helps determine and understand how what we do may affect people differently. While it is a key part of the evidence that is needed to demonstrate compliance with the Equality Act’s Public Sector Equality Duty (PSED), the most important outcome of this process is showing how individual research studies make a real difference to the lives of people from all communities.
To register for the online seminar titled ‘Making Equality Impact Assessments in Research a Reality’, which will run between 1pm and 3pm, click here.
Published on: 6 Dec 2023