Medical research charities are committed to funding research that positively impacts people living with health conditions or diseases. For many charities, this is only made possible through public donations and so charities must let the public know how their money is being spent and what impact it is having.
The pathway to impact is rarely linear. Instead, it often involves many different funders and research teams over a long period of time. This cumulative nature of impact makes it challenging to track in an effective way.
AMRC is helping a number of our members use an online tool called Researchfish that allows them to collect data on the outcomes of their research funding over time. Collecting data in this consistent way allows us to pool data together from many different charities and perform an in-depth cross-sector analysis of the outcomes of the research funded by our members.
This report follows on from our initial 2017 impact report, incorporating two more years of data and new stories of how charity-funded research has impacted patients and society. The report is structured around the five areas of impact shown below.
For a PDF version of this report please contact our Communications Officer, Leo.
If you have any questions please contact our Research, Data and Impact Manager, Jocelyn.
With thanks to the Medical Research Council, Researchfish, and participating charities.
In 2017 we published our first ever medical research charity sector impact report. The aims of that report were simple but ambitious: to define areas of impact for medical research and to show that despite significant challenges to tracking impact, charities of any size can demonstrate how the research they fund makes a difference to people and society.
There were some key findings that resulted from that initial analysis:
This year’s report builds on the five impact areas framework and goes a step further to think about how medical research charities fit into the bigger picture of health impact. It explores what makes charities unique and indispensable, what their role is in the research ecosystem, and how data collected with Researchfish helped to create an evidence base for these statements. Here are a few key points for reflection from this year's report:
Charity-funded research is making a real difference to patients, from improving prevention and early diagnosis, to developing innovative interventions and treatments that increase quality of life and survival rates, through to better disease management and end of life care.