Supporting Research Readiness in Social Enterprise Health Services
This paper, authored by 6 members of the Transform Research Alliance ; Nat Wright (Clinical Research Director), Linda Harris (TRA Chair), Andrew Burnell (Trustee from City Health Care Partnership), Sue Pender (City Health Care Partnership), Pip Hearty (Spectrum CIC) and George Charlesworth (TRA Co-ordinator), was published in BMC Health Services Research in 2017.
This research explored the current climate of research in social enterprise healthcare organisations. This included a brief introduction of social enterprises, the process of research governance in healthcare research (e.g. the Health Research Authority), and proposed recommendations for the governance issues experienced in social enterprises.
The recommendations were that social enterprises work in partnership with an NHS trust to take on governance functions; smaller social enterprises form a research alliance to share expertise across organisations; or larger social enterprises, with capacity, could stand alone.
Further research would be required on this topic area to evaluate the identified models of governance, to evaluate their potential for increasing research opportunities for social enterprises.
The full, open-access paper, can be accessed here:
https://bmchealthservres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12913-017-2607-3
