What were we trying to do?
We were trying to find ways to make it easier and more attractive for people – especially people from ethnic minorities – to become involved in kidney research.

 

Why was this important?
Kidney disease is a common condition that affects around 1 in every 10 adults over the age of 35 years. People from ethnic minority communities are more likely to be diagnosed with kidney disease but are less likely to take part in, and become involved in, research.

 

There are certain things that can make research involvement for ethnic minorities more difficult. These include differences in communication needs, not having a good understanding of research and concerns that research would interfere with their care. 

 

We believed that if we can addressed these factors, we could help more people living with kidney disease to take part in research. This would mean that we could improve the health and wellbeing of people from ethnic communities with kidney disease.

 

How did we do it?
We wanted to better understand and address why people weren't getting involved in kidney research, so we:

 

1. Trained a group of patients from ethnic communities to become ‘research ambassadors’.
2. Worked with our research ambassadors to interview people living with kidney disease from ethnic minority communities.
3. Used these interviews to find different ways of helping people from ethnic communities to take part in research, developing a new ‘Approach for Research’.

 

We could then see if the research ambassadors could successfully encourage kidney patients in our centre to take part in 2 projects:

 

1. The Salford Kidney Study
2. Signing up to a database (Research for the Future)

 

We compared the number of patients taking part in these projects before and after the research ambassadors were involved. 

 

We tested this with kidney patients, knowing that if it was successful, the same approach could be used for people living with other health conditions, such as cancer, diabetes, and heart disease. 

 

We are sharing our findings with patient groups, charities, healthcare professionals, and researchers in written reports, presentations and on social media.

 

 

Findings

Findings from this project will be available in due course.

 

 

Who did we work with?

• Northern Care Alliance NHS Foundation Trust
• Manchester Metropolitan University

 

Funding information
This study was funded via the NIHR Research for Patient Benefit programme (Award ID: NIHR205362)

 

More information

 

 

Programme Manager
Gill Rizzello
gill.rizzello@manchester.ac.uk