Alun Davies: Engaging communities for ethical research

My name is Alun Davies and I work for the Global Health Network.

The Global Health Network is a platform of resources to support global health research. It's also a community of practitioners who work in global health and global health research, and there's about a million members by now. My role in the Global Health Network is that I lead Mesh, which is the platform for community engagement within the Global Health Network.

Over the last 20 years or so, community engagement has really come to the fore as a major component of global health research. Over the last 20 years it's moved from being a nice to do set of activities to contribute to the ethical conduct of research, to being as Tedros the Director General of the WHO as he describes it, ‘the heart and soul of global health research’, contributing not only to the ethical conduct of research but also to the scientific rigour of global health research.

So, over the past two and a half years I've been working with colleagues in NIHR towards putting together an online training for community engagement and involvement in health research. This has brought together authors who are experts in the field and also reviewers who are experts in the field. Now that course has been launched in June of this year, and it's been accessed by over 5,000 people already, just in the first two months. The purpose of that course is towards strengthening capacity for community engagement with global health research.

Over the last decade or so there has been a shift towards emphasis in community engagement, and engagement communities with global health research. Funders of health research and high-level stakeholders are increasingly demanding that community engagement is done not only to feed proposals, upfront engagement, but also that strategies are designed so that engagement can contribute to ethical research practice and community engagement that accompanies research throughout the process. The challenge is that there's still a lack of awareness of what approaches can be used to engage communities, and what the goals should be, what the outcomes should be and how evaluation of engagement should be done, and that's where my work comes in. My work aims at strengthening, filling that gap and strengthening practice of community engagement.

Community engagement offers community members an opportunity to be at the table to feed their views, their questions, their concerns and their suggestions into agenda setting for research, how research is done, whether research is acceptable and feasible. And also, community engagement can be harnessed towards driving a demand for research uptake or for the translation of research into policy changes. Over the last two decades, there's been a build-up of evidence that community engagement can impact not only ethical research practice, but it can also contribute to scientific rigour. My work at Mesh aims at strengthening capacity for community engagement, which will strengthen global health research.

This interview was recorded in July 2024.