Reflections on exploratory conversations about healthcare research: it is time for a real change

Clinical research practitioners, nurses, allied healthcare professionals, doctors and any other healthcare professionals delivering clinical research have seen firsthand the under-representation of ethnic minorities as participants in research. This means that people who take part in research often do not reflect the target disease population. This can lead to health inequalities and disparities in treatment outcomes.

To explore ethnic minority communities' perspectives of clinical research and identify areas of research that may interest them.

The authors had exploratory conversations between October 2022 and March 2023 through patient and public involvement and engagement (PPI/E) consultations with Caribbean groups and Asian groups in their community centres and research delivery staff in Nottinghamshire. They found during these conversations that the community groups could benefit from a deeper understanding of clinical research, including its procedures and common misconceptions. They conceptualised the potential impacts of negative and positive research experiences.

Researchers, funders and stakeholders can facilitate participation in research. Researchers must focus on addressing barriers to participation by fostering continuous collaboration, offering research education, feeding back on the progress of research, building trustworthy relationships and addressing concerns that people might have about research or their immediate health.

This exploratory conversation demonstrates that researchers could provide meaningful research experience that would facilitate research participation by involving people from diverse backgrounds to influence the research question, methodology and every aspect of the research process through coproduction, codesign and PPI activities.