The Future of UK Clinical Research Delivery: Saving and improving lives 

Through a cross-sector, collaborative approach, the UK research system is working together on a coordinated and coherent programme of work that has been developed to ensure the recovery, resilience and growth of the UK’s clinical research sector.

Using The Future of UK Clinical Research Delivery as the collective vision, this continuous improvement programme aims to deliver faster, more efficient and more innovative clinical research – making the UK one of the best places in the world to design and deliver research.

The programme has already seen huge progress with: 

Find the most up to date data on the UK clinical research system by visiting our UK Clinical Research Update page

The 5 themes

The Future of UK Clinical Research Delivery vision is anchored in five overarching themes, which underpin the implementation plans.

The Vision and our response to Lord O’Shaughnessy’s independent review

On the 25th May 2023, the government announced plans to speed up clinical trials and make it easier for revolutionary healthcare treatments to get to NHS patients, backed by £121 million. This was followed in November 2023 with the full government response reinforcing these plans with a full system-wide response which had cross-sector input and outlined that over the next two years, we will:

The announcement, published in response to Lord O’Shaughnessy’s independent review, provides a prioritised delivery plan for both the recommendations in the review and the existing programme of work announced in our previous implementation plans. The full government response updates and supersedes our previous plans and provides renewed focus to ensure we make the progress necessary to ensure we are a global leader in the delivery of life sciences research while also ensuring continued progress towards our 10-year vision.

We have integrated Lord O’Shaughnessy’s recommendations into our implementation of our vision for the Future of UK Clinical Research Delivery to ensure a consistent and cohesive approach to improving the whole UK clinical research system and making the UK one of the best places in the world to conduct clinical research. Read more about the vision.