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Help set research priorities

Research priority setting is about finding and ranking research topics or questions.

The approach brings a wide range of people together to share and explore what’s important to them. This includes people who access care and support, social care providers, researchers and policy makers. 

Research priority setting:

  • helps us identify where there are gaps in evidence or knowledge
  • tells us what our key stakeholders feel is important to know and understand
  • can provide learning that helps make a positive difference in social care.

How does it work?

We ask people with lived experience and social care practitioners what they want to know and understand. This means we can help researchers and funders focus on research topics and questions that meet specific needs. 

As part of the process:

  • we use lots of different methods to find out what matters to people
  • we explore what research already exists or record where there are gaps in information or evidence
  • we ask our stakeholder groups to help us rank the research questions and come up with a ‘Top 10’ of priority research topics.

Our research priority setting work

In the past we’ve worked with Health and Care Research Wales in association with the James Lind Alliance on two priority-setting exercises: 

Our recent priority setting exercises include:

Other relevant priority-setting work

We’ve identified some research priority setting exercises run by other organisations that will also help identify topics that social care research can focus on:

Find out more

Our priority setting work informs the topics for our evidence summaries.

Find out more about our approach: Working together to make decisions on research.