Aim:

We seek to substantially advance research capacity and capability across child health. Our particular attention is in areas currently lacking research due to being deemed as too methodologically challenging (e.g. community-based health, social care, complex interventions) and new interdisciplinary areas that are central for addressing big future health challenges (e.g. paediatric MedTech, mental health, and prevention of multiple long-term conditions).

Our work:

Our work from 2020 to 2022 focused on establishing a national network of stakeholders (practitioners, methodologists, service users) interested in improving child health research, and on building shared understanding of challenges and opportunities in three topics: consenting children and young people in research; measuring child health outcomes; and increasing the diversity in patient and public involvement related to child health research.

The 2023-2024 will see us scaling up these discussions as we undertake a national prioritisation project to:

• Identify the range of key challenges in designing and delivering child health trials, and
• Prioritise the Top10 most important challenges that need to be addressed to increase the number and quality of child health trials.

The project will include all aspects of child health across clinical and population health, including any type of trial that includes an intervention and a comparator in children (0-16y), in the UK. We will use a range of ways to engage:

• Children, young people and families invited through national and regional service user networks;
• Child health experts (medical, allied health, nursing, health visiting, pharmacy, social care) invited through professional bodies; and
• Methodologists (trialists, statisticians, data scientists, economists, modellers, social scientists) invited through the NIHR Methodology Incubator.

Our stage 1 survey for child health experts and methodologists is now open – please do have your say!

Once agreed, the final Top10 child health trial methodology priorities will be published and disseminated widely. We will then begin, as part of the Methodology Incubator, the work to address the agreed priorities.

Leadership team:

Niina Kolehmainen, Sunil Bhopal