NIHR Performance Reporting

As health research is so important, the Trust collects performance data to help us understand how quickly we are setting up new studies and trials and how well we are delivering these. Two key metrics are collected and reported nationally, these relate to ‘initiating’ clinical trials and ‘delivering’ all commercial research. A clinical trial is defined as 'a set of medical research procedures conducted on human participants to allow safety and adverse effects of interventions, their efficacy, or their effectiveness to be established often by comparison with alternative or placebo/sham interventions. Interventions may be drugs, diagnostics, prophylactics, surgery, devices, non-invasive therapies, screening or other healthcare procedures or technologies.’ These are classified as the first four categories on the IRAS filter questions (Project Filter Question 2).

Initiating clinical trials: The national target for clinical trials is that each trial should recruit the first patient within 70 days from the date an NHS organisation received a valid research application.

Delivering commercial research: The national target for commercial contract research is that every commercial trial is delivered within the time agreed and that the target number of patients to be recruited is achieved.

Performance information on clinical and commercial trials hosted by The Royal Devon which received HRA approval within the last year can be found here.