Let’s Talk Labs

Laboratory or lab-based work is often the first step in research that improves the lives of people living with conditions like asthma, arthritis and cancer. It is key to understanding disease, finding new treatments and delivering clinical trials.

Whilst laboratory-based work may be scientific and specialised, patients and members of the public still have a stake in it.

To spark more conversations about this aspect of research, we have partnered with the Black & Asian Research Advisory Group (BRAG), Voice Up and people from Greater Manchester and researchers on #LetsTalkLabs, funded by the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) Manchester Biomedical Research Centre (BRC) and NIHR Manchester Clinical Research Facility (CRF).

What’s important to BRAG members?

BRAG members are community leaders from Greater Manchester, representing communities with experience of racial inequalities.

They told us that Let’s Talk Labs needed to:

• demystify the processes taking place in laboratory research.

• highlight community perspectives and questions.

• be relevant to Greater Manchester communities.

• be an opportunity for people to develop new skills.

Working together, we developed these as the guiding principles for the project.

New questions about lab research

We wanted to make sure that #Let’sTalkLabs would be interesting and accessible to a wide range of people. Our focus was on creating short films and stories that could be easily shared on social media and viewed on our website.

We worked with five members of the public who had no previous experience of lab-based research but were interested in the topic and had questions about it. Four BRAG members recruited people from their organisations, and we also recruited a Voice Up member.

To help the participants develop their ideas for their films we ran a series of co-production workshops for them and provided training in filmmaking with a local production company FreshRB.

All the filmmakers met with researchers and research staff from the Manchester BRC and Manchester CRF.

To make their films, some participants visited research labs, others invited researchers to community settings and filmed there. The finished films are short and accessible, ranging from 47 seconds to 2 minutes in length.

Let’s Talk Labs

Watch the films, and interviews, and hear reflections from everyone who took part in the campaign by searching #LetsTalkLabs on Facebook and X.

This campaign is part of our strategy to build relationships between people and research by co-producing creative public campaigns and programmes with different communities and researchers. These are shared with wider audiences to encourage more people to have a say in health research.