Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that all people diagnosed with pancreatic cancer who are eligible for clinical trials are able to access those trials.

The Government has set out a vision for the Future of UK Clinical Research Delivery, which aims to create a patient-centred, pro-innovation, and digitally enabled clinical research environment. Key to achieving this vision is increasing participation in research to ensure that the research we support is inclusive and representative of the populations we serve.

The Department-funded National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) funds research and research infrastructure which supports patients and the public to participate in high-quality research. For example, in financial year 2022/23, the NIHR Clinical Research Network supported 41 pancreatic cancer studies and recruited 1,004 participants to these studies.

In addition, the NIHR provides an online service called Be Part of Research which promotes participation in health and social care research by allowing users to search for relevant studies and register their interest. This makes it easier for people to find and take part in health and care research that is relevant to them.

When designing research studies, researchers consider inclusion and exclusion criteria carefully to ensure they are not unnecessarily excluding specific groups who would benefit from the outcome of their study. However, we are aware that inclusion and exclusion criteria can disproportionally exclude individuals from specific groups, for example older adults or pregnant women.

The Health Research Authority (HRA) is developing guidance to improve practices in this area. We are not aware that people with pancreatic cancer are routinely being excluded from studies, however, we know that sometimes people are automatically excluded from taking part, and this can be for good reasons. The guidance produced by the HRA will help researchers to consider if these people and any other groups of people may be unnecessarily excluded, and consider putting measures in place to address this.