Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, if he will make it his policy that publicly-funded medical trials (a) must be balanced by sex and (b) results must be sex-disaggregated.

Medical trials, wherever possible, should always be balanced by sex, however, certain clinical trials are designed to investigate conditions that are only specific to one sex, so enforcing a balance would not make sense on those occasions.

The Department commissions research through the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). As outlined in the Research Inclusion Strategy 2022-2027, the NIHR is committed to exploring an approach which enables and encourages the research community to integrate sex and gender into their research design, including in the disaggregation of research findings. The Research Inclusion Strategy 2022-2027 is available at the following link:

https://www.nihr.ac.uk/about-us/who-we-are/research-inclusion/strategy-2022-27

On 10 March, the NIHR launched its sex and gender policy, which is expected to come into force later in 2025, with further information available at the following link:

https://www.nihr.ac.uk/integrating-sex-and-gender-health-and-care-research

Implementing such a policy will ensure that research accounts for sex and gender across every stage of the research cycle, thus facilitating both funding into topics that impact males and females, and a greater understanding of how they might be impacted differently by the same health condition.