Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what lessons have been learnt on clinical trial recruitment during the covid-19 pandemic; and what plans he has to apply those learnings in his Department’s approach to new medicines more widely.

The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) is taking several steps to learn from the COVID-19 pandemic and will apply these learnings in its future approach to clinical research. The NIHR has conducted a lessons learned exercise and is now developing a ‘Standard Operating Procedure’ for a response to a future emergency which requires a rapid and co-ordinated response from the system, and will also draw upon these lessons to identify and recommend changes to business as usual practice. To complement this, the NIHR regularly reviews the progress and performance of nationally prioritised COVID-19 Urgent Public Health Research studies, and insights are used to inform the continuous improvement of prioritisation, placement, set up and delivery of other COVID-19 studies.