Health and Care Research Wales (HCRW)

Health and Care Research Wales (HCRW) is the Welsh Government-funded national body responsible for promoting, funding, and coordinating health and social care research in Wales. It was established in 2015 with the support of the Welsh Government and is headquartered in Cardiff. HCRW sits within the Population Healthcare Directorate of Welsh Government’s Research and Development Division, reporting through that division and the Chief Medical Officer to the Minister for Health and Social Services — it is a government-embedded body, not an arm’s-length charity, which is one of the structural differences from its England-side counterparts.

What HCRW actually does

Research administrators most commonly encounter HCRW through three functions:

• National funding schemes. HCRW runs its own competitive funding routes — fellowships, studentships, and infrastructure funding — open to researchers and institutions based in Wales. These sit alongside, not instead of, UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) and charity funders; a Wales-based researcher may hold an HCRW fellowship and separately apply to UKRI or a medical research charity for project funding.
• Research delivery infrastructure. HCRW funds the research nurses, delivery staff, and support units embedded across NHS Wales health boards that make it operationally possible to run a clinical study at a Welsh site — recruiting participants, collecting data, and supporting day-to-day trial conduct. This is comparable in function to what the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) funds in England through its Clinical Research Network.
• Evidence and knowledge mobilisation. Through bodies such as the Health and Care Research Wales Evidence Centre (established 2023), HCRW also funds rapid evidence reviews that inform Welsh health and social care policy directly, distinct from its research-funding role.

HCRW and UK-wide research permissions

The UK’s health research governance system is devolved: the Health Research Authority (HRA) grants HRA Approval, which combines the ethical review (via a Research Ethics Committee) and NHS permissions for the English sites of a study into one national decision. HRA Approval does not, by itself, cover the equivalent local permissions needed to open a study at an NHS or HSC site outside England. For a Welsh site, that local step runs through HCRW, which coordinates the Wales-specific research-permissions and capacity-and-capability arrangements that a study still needs before it can open there — the same underlying pattern used by NHS Research Scotland and Northern Ireland’s HSC R&D Division for their own nations. A study team scoping a UK-wide, multi-nation trial needs to budget for this coordination step explicitly rather than assuming HRA Approval alone opens every UK site.

HCRW vs. England’s equivalents

HCRW is frequently confused with two English bodies it is neither part of nor a subsidiary of:

• HRA is a UK-wide statutory regulator for the ethics/permissions decision itself (HRA Approval); HCRW is a Welsh Government funding and delivery-infrastructure body. HCRW is one of the national partner organisations the HRA-Approval and REC system works alongside for Wales-based sites, not a Welsh branch of the HRA.
• NIHR is HCRW’s closest functional analogue — both fund national research infrastructure and career-development schemes — but NIHR’s remit is England only. HDR UK (Health Data Research UK) lists both HCRW and NIHR among its national funders, which is one of the clearer signals that they are parallel, nation-specific bodies rather than one containing the other.

For research administrators supporting a Wales-based researcher or a UK-wide multi-site study, the practical takeaway is: check HCRW’s own funding schemes as a Wales-specific route distinct from NIHR, and budget separately for the Wales-side research-permissions step even where a study already holds HRA Approval.