The RRI Health Awards are a new approach to research funding designed to integrate RRI principles into the research funding and performing process, thus “opening up” research funding. ISCIII (Instituto de Salud Carlos III), is a Spanish national funding body that developed the ‘RRI Health Awards’ to recognise, encourage, promote and disseminate best practice examples of RRI activities undertaken by its accredited Health Research Institutes during 2019. Each award is a grant of 10,000 Euros for RRI actions that have been carried out in the previous year in the field of health and biomedicine.
The call was developed using a co-creation process involving multiple stakeholders. The call was open to all 31 Health Research Institutes across the Spanish territory, encompassing over 162 institutions and more than 24,000 researchers. The Health Research Institutes are entities dedicated to basic and applied research that involve hospitals within the National Health System, universities, public research organisations and public or private research centres. Each have a multidisciplinary composition and involve many different stakeholders.