Health professionals should be involved in setting research priorities

Health professionals play a critical role in health research. In the UK, 41% of consultant physicians in the NHS report research involvement.1 Every year, many thousands of doctors, nurses, and other clinicians (“clinician researchers”) take part in health research globally—from designing studies to collecting data to treating research participants. But the expertise that makes clinician researchers well suited to conducting research is also needed for a vital prior step: deciding what research should be done in the first place.Priority settingFunding and other resources for health research are limited. Difficult choices must be made about how to allocate them. Research priority setting is the process of making decisions about which research programmes should be supported and which should not. Priority setting can be formal, as when a funding body carries out a strategic planning exercise. But it can also be informal: any time that decisions are made about what interventions to…