Funders publish guidance on communicating with participants in health research

The Wellcome Trust and the Medical Research Council have published a framework for communicating health findings arising from research studies to individual study participants.

The guidance, published on 31 March, was developed in collaboration with the NHS Health Research Authority and received support from several other organisations and funders.

The framework is intended to help researchers and ethics committees establish their own policies about whether to tell study participants about findings made that relate to their health. Until now, there has been little consensus about what is the best course of action. Under the framework, researchers will be required to have such a policy and to communicate it to study participants during the consent process.