Monitoring our progress

Over the last five years, we have strengthened our processes for monitoring and tracking the outcomes arising from our support - helping to inform future strategy and building the evidence base to demonstrate the importance of biomedical research to the economy and wider society.

Our Assessment Framework was established to enable progress to be tracked and to help understand the impact of the work we fund and how we are making a difference. We have been producing our Assessment Framework Report annually to monitor our progress since the 2005/2006 period.

At the Wellcome Trust, we ensure that our approach to monitoring and evaluation is balanced, proportionate and taken forward in close partnership with those we fund. We also strive to ensure that we do not introduce perverse incentives to the research community, increase the burden of reporting unnecessarily, nor, most importantly, divert researchers from the task of making discoveries and using these to improve health and wellbeing.

We recognise that the road to discovery can be long and complex - the impacts of our funding are likely to emerge some considerable time after our spending, and the direct link to human and animal health may be difficult to track.

To this end, we have developed a series of high-level indicators of progress. We draw on both quantitative and qualitative information to provide an overview of how and where our support is making a difference.

We actively use the information collected to develop and refine our funding strategies, and to communicate the achievements and outcomes that result from the research we support.