The NIHR and MRC Better Methods, Better Research (BMBR) programme is funding work to develop evaluative methodologies that can survive contact with social care settings. Applications are typically expected to be valued up to £625,000 at 100% full economic cost.
The problem the call sets out is a familiar one to anyone who has tried to run a trial outside a hospital. The methods built for clinical settings frequently do not work in social care, and the result is a thin evidence base in exactly the area the NHS 10-Year Plan is pushing care towards. This opportunity is about fixing the methods rather than evaluating any particular service, and it should be read as a serious opening for dementia researchers working in care homes, community settings and adult social care.
What they will fund
Your application must focus on method development, not on evaluating a specific social care intervention. The goal is to enable robust, evaluative study designs in non-clinical contexts with social care endpoints. BMBR uses the term “highly applicable” for what it wants: methods that transfer quickly from one context to another.
The stated areas of interest are broad, and not exhaustive:
- Experimental and quasi-experimental designs, including Target Trial Emulation built on routine local authority and social care administrative data, and ways of handling the fragmentation and gaps in those datasets.
- Participant dropout, meaning trial designs that can cope with the attrition rates seen in residential care.
- Outcome and quality of life measurement beyond standard HRQoL, applicable across multiple settings, including frameworks for measuring wider impacts on informal family carers.
- Complex interventions, specifically frameworks for assessing how they get modified when moved between local authorities with different resources.
- Informed consent in vulnerable and seldom heard groups, and integrating high quality data from them into large scale comparative effectiveness trials. Our capacity and consent resources are a reasonable starting point if this is new territory.
- Study design and implementation where support arrangements cross multiple organisations, sectors and funding sources.
- Acceptability of RCTs in social care, including identifying the conditions that make them feasible and acceptable to practitioners.
Whatever you propose, it has to come with at least two case studies demonstrating the method working in a social care setting. These can use existing administrative datasets or retrospective cohorts, and they should be chosen for their value in showing other teams that the method is worth adopting. You will need to justify that choice explicitly, and take account of other studies already in the BMBR portfolio. There is also a good deal of methodological thinking in dementia trials that transfers into this space.
Public involvement is described as essential here rather than expected, and specifically for identifying the research questions and for testing whether the methods are acceptable to people whose circumstances may give rise to vulnerability, people who may lack capacity to make a complex research decision, and the social care workforce itself.
Money and timing
Applications are expected to be valued up to £625,000 at 100% FEC. MRC and NIHR will usually fund up to 80% of that. Teams must start work within six months of award, so the proposal needs to be ready to run rather than ready to staff.
You must also detail how inclusive research design, and sex and gender, have been considered across the whole research lifecycle, with any associated costs, following the NIHR research inclusion guidance. This funding opportunity is eligible for a methodological sub-study.
What you write
The detailed research plan is capped at 20 A4 pages, and anything beyond that will not be read. A Gantt chart or project management plan is a mandatory separate upload, along with up to three A4 pages of references as a PDF. BMBR applications do not need a flow diagram, a logic model or a flexible upload.
Support for applicants
There is a webinar on Wednesday 30 September, 1.45pm to 2.45pm, covering this opportunity and general application advice, with a Q and A at the end. Note that the time was moved from the originally advertised 2.30pm.
Separately, there is an in person writing workshop on Tuesday 20 October, 10am to 4pm in London, run by the HTA Programme and the NIHR Research Support Service, on building strong social care applications. If you are in England, the Research Support Service will also help you develop an application free of charge.
Key dates
- 8 September 2026, 1.00pm, opened to full applications
- 30 September 2026, 1.45pm, applicant webinar
- 20 October 2026, HTA and RSS social care writing workshop, London
- 1 December 2026, 1.00pm, applications close
- January or February 2027, notification if out of remit or non-competitive
- May or June 2027, expected funding decision
Reference ID 2026/466. Full details are on the NIHR funding opportunity page, and questions go to bmbr@nihr.ac.uk.
If your methodological idea is not specific to social care, BMBR also has a researcher-led opportunity closing on the same day, where you set the question rather than responding to a brief.
One thing to check before you commit: this call is deliberately complementary to the Research Programme for Social Care opportunity 2026/436, which closes on 30 September 2026. The two programmes aligned them on purpose, so it is worth reading both before deciding which your idea belongs in.
Visit funding web page
(https://www.nihr.ac.uk/funding/development-novel-evaluative-methodologies-overcome-systemic-barriers-social-care-research/2026466)
