Engaging communities for ethical research

The Global Health Network supports researchers in global health with resources and a community of one million practitioners. Mesh, TGHN platform for community engagement, is offering an online training course for community engagement and involvement in health research. Ensuring that community members are involved in all steps of the research process has become vital, enhancing both ethics and scientific rigour, and improving research practices and policy influence.

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Alun Davies is a Senior Programmes Manager, leading the Mesh community engagement network for the Global Health Network. Mesh is an online network for people working in community engagement with global health research. It is a collaborative, open access knowledge hub where community engagement practitioners, researchers, health workers and others can network, share resources and discuss good practice.

Alun has two decades’ experience of health research and engagement in a wide range of countries, including leading a WHO Technical Working Group for Good Participatory Practice on a large multi-country adaptive platform trial. He has published widely on participatory visual methods, community engagement and informed consent, including a literature review  in this area in relation to large platform trials. The latter is part of a larger collaborative piece of work for the WHO towards "creating truly inclusive and ethical future research in public health emergencies." Most recently, Alun led a rapid research project gathering the views of global health professionals towards informing WHO’s Interim guidance on social and behavioural research for the Mpox public health response. 

His career in research began through supporting the establishment of HIV clinical trials in Kenya and following this, as an engagement co-lead for public engagement at the KEMRI-Wellcome Research Programme (KWRP). His PhD on evaluating Public Engagement, provided a foundation for establishing an award-winning school engagement programme which aims nurturing an interest in science and research among young people and drawing from their unique insights towards improving research.  He led the growth of this initiative from a 3 school pilot, to a large programme facilitating annual engagement between researchers and 4000 students across over 70 schools and colleges across Kenya.

He has led and partnered with youth engagement initiatives in several multi-country initiatives aimed at drawing from youth perspectives towards informing, for example: an Antimicrobial Resistance learning framework for in-school and out-of-school education.  Shigella Vaccine Human Infection Studies (at KWRP); and the Nuffield Council on Bioethics report on “Children and Clinical Research: Ethical issues” .