National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) in partnership with NHS Digital, and the Northern Ireland, Scottish and Welsh Governments have launched an NHS Covid-19 vaccine research registry to enable large numbers of people to be recruited into vaccine trials.
This is a national programme which will allow researchers to contact people who are interested in taking part in vaccine trials as and when they become available.
Members of the public can sign up at www.nhs.uk/conditions/coronavirus-covid-19/research and via the NIHR Be Part of Research website, where there is more information about vaccines www.bepartofresearch.nihr.ac.uk/vaccine-studies.
Further information about the service is available in this NIHR news item.
How does it work?
- The registry has been developed as part of the UK Government’s Vaccine Taskforce, in partnership with the NIHR, NHS Digital, and the Northern Ireland, Scottish and Welsh Governments.
- NIHR is also collaborating with ZOE, the company behind the Covid-19 symptom study who have 3.5 million UK users of their app, to work together to enrol their volunteers onto vaccine trials.
- Working with the NHS, NIHR aims to recruit over half a million people nationally onto the registry, which will allow people to be put in touch with the vaccine trials in the coming months.
- Researchers are looking for people from all backgrounds, ages and parts of the UK, including both people with or without existing health conditions, to take part in vaccine studies, to make sure that any vaccines developed will work for everyone.
- The service is available to anyone aged 18 or over, living in the UK.
- To register, users need to fill in some personal and contact details, and answer a series of basic health screening questions on a www.nhs.uk website form. The service is highly secure, with personal data and permissions held in a NHS system managed by NHS Digital.
- By registering through the service, users are not signing up to take part in a specific trial or study. Instead, researchers working on vaccine studies supported by the NIHR will be able to search for volunteers who have signed up to the service. Signing up is an individual choice.
- When a suitable volunteer has been identified, the researchers will send an email or text to anyone who matches the criteria for their study. This will provide more information about the study – and offer you the opportunity to contact the research team and find out more, or express an interest to take part.
- There is no obligation to take part in any study and users can change their mind and remove their contact details from the registry at any time.