[Eleanor]
Welcome to today's Allen + Clarke webinar. Before we begin today, we would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land we work on and the communities that we work with. Today, Emma and I are on the beautiful lands of the Wurundjeri people of the Kulin Nations here in Narm or Melbourne.
We know that you're joining us from the lands of different traditional owners and custodians around the country. We acknowledge their history, culture and elders past and present. I'm Eleanor Jenkin, the Impact and Insights Lead here at Allen & Clark's Melbourne office.
[Emma]
Hi, everybody. I'm Emma Kelleher. I am the Strategy and Planning Lead for Allen & Clark also in our Melbourne office.
For those of you who might not know who Allen & Clark is or are joining us for the first time, we are a consultancy that specialises in evaluation, strategy, change management and policy. The work that we deliver ensures that really complex, high-stakes decisions are made with evidence and that they can be defended with confidence and that they are built to work for the people and communities affected.
[Eleanor]
In today's webinar, we're going to be doing a deep dive into the 2025 National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research. More specifically, look at what it means for people involved in delivering evaluations for government. Before we dive in, I think let's start with the So the National Statement on Ethical Conduct in Human Research is Australia's key framework for ethical research involving people.
It's developed by the National Health and Medical Research Council and it sets out the principles and the guidance that researchers and human research ethics committees need to follow.
[Emma]
Yeah, that's right. And so why does it matter then for people doing government evaluations? Well, because most of those evaluations involve collecting information from people.
So that could be through interviews, focus groups, running surveys, or it might just be analysing their data. So if your evaluation meets the definition of research, then the National Statement applies. And so that means you do need to consider ethics approval, informed consent, data protection and all the other requirements that are in the statement.
Getting it wrong can delay your evaluation, it can create extra risks, or worst of all, it can cause harm to participants. So the National Statement, it's been around for some time, since 1999 actually. The most recent revisions to the statement were released in March 2025, and the NHMRC has said that this new 2025 version will formally come into force in early 26, but that specific date is still to be advised.
But we do know that many ethics committees are already applying the revised statement. And for those of us involved in government evaluation, these changes have real implications for how we procure, design and deliver evaluations.
[Eleanor]
So today we're going to focus on the most significant changes in the revised statement, and specifically that's Section 4. Section 4 deals with research involving people who may be at increased risk of harm, or have a different or elevated risk profile. We've identified three key shifts which underlie the suite of revisions in Section 4.
The first shift is from the concept of vulnerability to contextual risk. The second is from protectionism to inclusion, and the third is from the concept of research on to research with. Today we're going to work through each of these shifts, but I think before we do, Emma, can you talk us through how the scope of Section 4 has changed?
[Emma]
Yeah, absolutely. So the scope is a bit of a significant change in the new version. In the 2023 version, Section 4 only applied to certain listed groups, but in 2025 those groups have changed slightly.
So the pregnancy and fetus sections have been tweaked, and the sections on people dependent on medical care and those with cognitive impairment have been consolidated. So you can see some of these shifts on this slide. But the big change to Section 4 is no longer limited to that shopping list.
So it now applies to research involving anyone who might be at increased risk of harm because of specific characteristics or circumstances or the nature of the particular research project, or how those two things interact with each other. The 2025 statement also contains new guidance on whether a person is considered to be included in research. So the revised statement does cast the net quite wide for what that means.
Someone is considered included or involved where their participation is likely, foreseeable, but even incidental. So the statement now aligns with other existing evaluation guidance, particularly on research involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities. So some of the key things that as evaluators we now need to consider are, are you evaluating how a program works for different priority cohorts?
Then Section 4 likely applies. Are you analysing administrative data to see if outcomes differ for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people? Then Section 4 likely applies, even if you're not specifically targeting those people for recruitment.
Or are you evaluating a national program and you want to understand barriers to access for people from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds? Then again, Section 4 likely applies. We're going to go into some further detail in the session today about what we mean when we say Section 4 likely applies, because parts of Section 4 contain updated guidance which must be followed for certain aspects of evaluation design and delivery.
[Eleanor]
So, having covered off on the scope, let's move on to that first big shift in the guidance, and that's from a framing of vulnerability to contextual risk of harm. Earlier versions of the statement framed certain groups as inherently vulnerable based on physical, cognitive, social, economic or cultural factors, and it reflected a really fixed categorical approach to thinking about risk of harm. The 2025 statement is a fairly firm move away from that framing towards thinking about increased risk of harm as contextual.
So, it's framed as being dependent on the interplay between a person's own circumstances and the research context. It positions risk of harm as individualised and intersectional. So, what that means is that as evaluators, we can't think about participants one dimensionally.
A person with disability isn't inherently at risk of harm in all research contexts. What the statement acknowledges is that depending on that individual person's characteristics and circumstances and the work that you're doing, they may experience increased elevated risk. And if your evaluation involves complex consent processes, if it has inaccessible materials, if it doesn't account in its design for the legacy of poor research practices in the disability sector in the past, then that might even increase the risk of harm.
What we need to be doing under the new statement is making sure that we're looking at how an individual's specific characteristics interact with the nature and the setting of the research, and then considering what that means for the risk profile. So, we need to take into account broader life circumstances and consider the impact of intersecting characteristics and disadvantages. The statement sets out a range of characteristics and life circumstances which it considers might increase risk of harm or potentially limit someone's autonomy.
And the statement acknowledges that for any one individual, different factors might be at play at different times.
[Emma]
Yeah, it's really interesting. So, a question that comes to mind for me though is, let's say you're designing and delivering an evaluation of a large-scale universal access program that might be right across Australia. What would an intersectional individualized approach look like in that scenario?
And is it even possible?
[Eleanor]
Yeah, I think that's a very fair question. And I think quite clearly, realising the vision of the statement is a lot trickier in those sorts of evaluations. As evaluators, the risk is always there that we're going to be making assumptions about participants based on a single characteristic because the breadth of the work that we're doing is so wide.
My key takeaway here is know your participants. So, I think it is implicit in the statement that as evaluators, we use our best efforts to understand participants and respond to emerging information about them. I'll give you an example.
We recently completed several evaluations of programs that are responding to family violence, and these were national programs. As part of those evaluations, we engaged with victim survivors. So, we knew that we would be engaging with people who have experienced violence and trauma and who may have experienced trauma resulting from interactions with police, justice and child protection systems.
But we deliberately made an effort not to just view people as victim survivors. And we tried to do that by taking a few different steps. The first was speaking with service providers in advance to really understand the profile of the people that they worked with.
The second was that we sought pre-interview information from the people that we were planning to speak with, and that included understanding what they needed to participate fully and safely in the process. So, for some people, that meant saying, I want cameras off in my online interview. For others, it meant saying, look, I'm neurodiverse.
I'd like to have some breaks built into that interview. We boosted the information about voluntariness to try and really deliberately mitigate the power imbalance between government and service user. And we made sure that we arranged wraparound support if any issues did arise during engagement.
And they did. So, we were able to make sure that people were able to get help where they were experiencing mental distress and in another case where someone was experiencing housing insecurity.
[Emma]
Yeah, it's a really, really good example. Another interesting feature of the new statement is that risk of harm is now considered a dynamic factor. So, increased risk of harm is no longer considered a fixed characteristic at a certain point in time.
It can vary over time as a project progresses or as a participant's personal circumstances change. So, what this means is that as evaluators, we must build in processes that can detect and respond to people's changes in risk profile. So, that might mean building risk assessment into different stages of your research.
And it is really incumbent on researchers to ensure that we're doing things like affirming consent at different moments and being alive to people's changing circumstances and able to adapt our approach accordingly.
[Eleanor]
I mean, it seems to me, Emma, that on one level that's quite straightforward. But what if your dynamic risk assessment surfaces information that means that you need to adapt your evaluation approach? I'm wondering how that expectation of dynamic assessment sits with the existing HREC system and processes.
[Emma]
Yeah, it's a really good question and probably a little bit awkwardly right now, I would say, because, you know, as we know, ethics approvals are provided before research is able to commence. And any diversion from that approved plan requires an ethics amendment and that takes time and it often takes extra money. So, the changes in the national statement do demonstrate a shift towards a more iterative developmental approach to risk assessment and whether ethics committees adjust their processes to accommodate for this still remains to be seen.
But in the meantime, the things that we can do, I think, are increasingly built into our evaluations and expectation both internally within our teams and also with the clients or organisations that have commissioned the evaluation to be done so that they understand we might need to seek amendments to ethics along the way as a way to be responsive through the life of the project.
[Eleanor]
So, we know from the questions that we received from people attending the webinar today before the webinar, that a lot of people are keen to understand how requirements for ethics review have changed. The 2023 statement mandated HREC review for research involving a range of specific populations. The 2025 statement has done away with mandatory review in most circumstances and that includes where research involves Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and people with cognitive impairment, intellectual disability or mental illness.
You still have to, it is still mandatory, to seek ethics committee review where your evaluation involves people involved in illegal activities or where you're seeking a young person's assent but you're not seeking parental consent. And interestingly, that's a scenario that wasn't even mentioned in the previous statement. In all other situations, researchers are expected to assess the risk profile of the research and seek ethics approval where it's higher than lower risk.
So, in short, section 2 and section 5 are largely unchanged in the national statement. Evaluators now have more flexibility, more discretion in determining review pathways. But that also means that commissioning agencies and evaluators will need to really properly assess the risk of harm rather than just defaulting to HREC review.
In some ways, it means that we have to take up a little bit more responsibility, a bit more intentionally.
[Emma]
Yeah, okay. So, let's call out the metaphorical elephant in the room. Does this mean that evaluators can now avoid ethics review?
In a word, no.
[Eleanor]
Or at least more often than not, no. So, the statement also acknowledges that when an evaluation involves individuals from a lot of those population cohorts we've mentioned, ethics review is often, usually or most commonly required. And to be totally honest, I expect that for most of the work that we do here at Allen & Clark, we'll still be seeking ethics review in the same circumstances as before.
The difference is that we'll be doing it not because it's mandatory, we'll be doing it because of our own thorough assessment of the participants in the research context, leading us to make, you know, form a view that there is a risk of harm that is greater than discomfort.
[Emma]
So, you would assess that as something higher than low risk? Correct. Yeah, that's right.
[Eleanor]
I do think the new statement opens up the possibility that in some evaluations, that risk of harm may be assessed as low or lower. And obviously, in those circumstances, you know, you do have a different pathway now. But ultimately, the ethical responsibility to really meaningfully assess risk of harm and then to select the right review pathway rests on all of us as evaluators.
[Emma]
Yeah, okay. So, I think that's probably an appropriate point for us to do a bit of a recap of this first conceptual shift in Section 4 of the 2025 Statement, which being from a vulnerability framing to contextual risk. So, our big tips are, one, know your participants, use your best efforts to understand your participants and their lives, rather than making assumptions about risk based on single characteristics.
Two is on dynamic assessments. So, incorporate risk assessments into each phase of your evaluation and be ready to adapt your evaluation approach accordingly. And then the third is no more HREC autopilot review.
So, in all cases, you have to assess the risk level and determine the appropriate pathway for the assessment of your evaluation. And that assessment needs to account for participants' characteristics, their life circumstances, and how they interact with the context of your research. So, let's move on then to the second key shift, which is from a protectionist approach towards inclusion and equity.
In the past, evaluators might have excluded particular groups from their research, such as children, because the ethical hurdles were just too high. The 2025 Statement now explicitly says we have an ethical responsibility to minimise those barriers to inclusion. So, if you plan to exclude a group, you now have to provide a strong justification to reviewers for why that is.
And this means you must actively support the self-determination of participants by providing them with supports they need to make their own informed decisions about whether they want to participate or not. So, it does mean that evaluators can no longer default to just excluding certain population groups. The Statement says that as researchers, we need to consider modifications to the design of our research projects and put additional safeguards in place to enable participation.
[Eleanor]
And I think the implications for government evaluations of this change are probably more significant than they might seem on the surface. We know that government evaluations often have limited budgets, compressed timeframes, pragmatic decisions routinely made about which stakeholder groups to engage. Yeah, absolutely, they are.
[Emma]
But I think we can expect that ethics committees, though, will still look more closely at who we're including and who we're excluding and the ethics of both of those decisions. So, at times, I think evaluators will need to provide a better justification than just the budget doesn't stretch that far. So, if your evaluation aims to understand how a program works across different population groups, you'll need to think hard about adapting your approach and materials for each cohort.
So, in Alan and Clark, some examples of how we are doing that is we are increasing our emphasis on how engagements are made accessible, including to people with disability who may have a range of access needs, or tailoring of materials, such as the use of video, audio, visual, easy English, and materials in language as well. So, we do expect that ethics committees will have higher expectations for these types of modifications.
[Eleanor]
I think the 2025 Statements approach to children and young people is a good example of this emphasis on inclusion. The 2025 Statement maintains the same principle of consent as the 2023 version, and that's obviously that you need parental or guardian permission where a child lacks capacity to provide their own. But it introduces the concept of assent, the process of informing and seeking agreement from children or young people, even when they don't have the maturity to consent for themselves.
Under the new revised Statement, in most circumstances, you need to obtain assent in addition to parental and guardian consent.
[Emma]
So, how do you meaningfully seek assent from children who are at different developmental stages? And the other factor that comes to mind is how do you address the power imbalance between children and their parents or guardians or the service providers or the evaluators?
[Eleanor]
So at Allen & Clark we've been incorporating assent into our evaluations involving children and young people for quite a number of years and the practice that we've developed includes creating assent materials which are age and stage appropriate but also having assent procedures which deliberately try and mitigate that power imbalance you're talking about. What does that look like? That looks like having appropriately skilled evaluation team members with specific expertise in child psychology and engagement.
It looks like seeking and re-seeking assent at multiple touch points and it looks like using engagement techniques that are appropriate to developmental stage such as play-based or techniques not just to run an interview but to actually obtain that assent in the first place. Yeah that makes sense. So on a recent project we developed an assent form aimed at children aged 7 to 10 years and this was a form that we shared with parents and guardians and with counsellors working with the children we were engaging in advance and counsellors worked with those families to obtain the initial consent and assent.
However our team included a child psychologist who was conducting the interviews and that person used play-based approaches to reaffirm assent in advance of those engagements.
[Emma]
Yeah okay great example. So that brings us to our third key shift in the national statement which is from the concept of research on to research with. The value and importance of consulting with people who are affected by research that's long been recognised as good practice including through mechanisms like co-design.
The 2025 statement is catching up I'd say with the evaluation community by embedding a much stronger focus on early consultation and engagement where research may involve individuals at increased risk of harm.
[Eleanor]
So early engagement is mentioned throughout section 4 and it's positioned as a key strategy to firstly make sure research and its priorities are guided by the people and communities it will affect and secondly to enhance inclusivity by enabling early identification and mitigation of barriers to participation. But we do know that the way government evaluations are often scoped, procured, resourced and designed don't always lend themselves to meaningful pre-design engagement. Scoping tends to happen internally and that sort of sets the budget and the time frame.
Procurement often finalises that budget and also the scope for the evaluator and the early planning process means that methods and sequencing are actually settled within pretty narrow parameters from the outset. We popped up a slide that captures how often engagement with stakeholders actually kicks in long after the space for them to meaningfully influence evaluation design has closed down.
[Emma]
Yeah so I mean this is definitely true but I think there are some key steps that everyone involved in scoping government evaluations can take and they do all involve bringing stakeholders in earlier in the process. So if you're in government or and you're scoping or procuring an evaluation it's really important to get clear on who your evaluation involves from the outset. So understanding which cohorts you'll be analysing, what outputs you'll be focusing on.
If you decide really early on if you're going to need input from it might be consumers or beneficiaries of the program or delivery staff or the public because this will shape your RFQ and your evaluation plan. And so on that yeah considering preliminary engagement before an RFQ is settled is really beneficial and is encouraged in the national statement. So this could involve preliminary engagement with standing reference groups or advisory groups, peak bodies or similar forums to that.
And also it's really important to allow for consultation in the design phase as you say earlier on. Make it an expectation in the RFQ, build in time and budget for that and provide flexibility in contracting so that consultation can really meaningfully inform the evaluation design. I think definitely in our experience earlier investment in engagement can definitely save money and time down the track and it makes ethics approvals much smoother and it also makes sure that your methods really work for the people that you're trying to engage.
[Eleanor]
So Emma the last part of section four which we're going to cover today is chapter 4.7 which relates to evaluations involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities. The changes in this section are really consequential they could easily merit a whole webinar of their own. I'm going to defer to Aboriginal researchers to really lead on interpreting those new provisions but I do think it's important in this forum to touch on a few key changes that all of us really need to be aware of.
So the statement now explicitly recognises the adverse and harmful impacts that research has had on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities and it contains a really you know quite strong overarching statement on the importance of research being led and governed by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities themselves. So it's in that vein that the specific guidance of that section has been strengthened quite significantly and I think the change is best summed up by pointing out that a lot of the guidance that was previously described as a should is now framed as a must. So some examples of that are you must show evidence of respectful and meaningful engagement with the communities involved and the statement says that might include a formal research agreement or it might be a documented engagement process but the important thing is being able to demonstrate that communities have had the opportunity to discuss the research, understand it and agree to participate.
You must ensure engagement includes mutually agreed mechanisms for a range of things including how community consultation and engagement will occur, appropriate recruitment techniques including consent strategies, opportunities for co-design and collaboration and how findings outcomes and benefits are going to be shared. And the last one to point out is you must have local level support from each community your evaluation touches.
[Emma]
Yeah, okay. So Indigenous self-determination and control that have been recognised for a long time in guidance like the IATSE's Code of Ethics but what impact Eleanor do you expect them to have now that they are described as must-haves in the National Statement? What sort of impact do you think that might have especially for multi-site or national evaluations?
[Eleanor]
Well Emma I think this is an evolving space. I know that we had a question before the session about whether removing the mandatory requirement to get HREC approval when your research involves Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander communities, whether that might lead evaluators to bypassing jurisdictional Aboriginal HRECs. My preliminary sense is that an awful lot of government evaluations involving First Nations people will generally involve higher risk just by virtue of the history of harmful impacts both of research and a lot of government policies on those communities and the power dynamics involved between government and First Nations communities.
So look I'm not convinced we're going to see a flood of evaluations that are sort of spuriously describing research as low risk in an effort to avoid the ethics process. I do think that the National Statement revision set the bar higher for researchers and non-Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander evaluators and institutions and those who are commissioning them to do work will need to invest and build in wider and deeper partnerships with Aboriginal communities and people. They will need to build in adequate time and budget particularly for that early engagement, that preliminary engagement, which has been positioned as so key throughout the National Statement.
And they will need to factor in the implications of local engagement into evaluation design and in a lot of ways I actually think this is the trickiest part to navigate because it involves a significant investment of time and money if you have multiple locations involved. I do think it's incumbent on evaluators to take these steps. I also think it's important that the NHREC sector works together with researchers to reduce the barriers to good evaluation.
And that's so important because it's incumbent on us all to make sure that communities who are included are included and involved and have a meaningful opportunity to participate in evaluations that are relevant to them.
[Emma]
Yeah absolutely. So we've covered a lot of ground in our session today on the Statement. I think before we move to questions we'll just do a quick recap of the six key steps that you can take to align your evaluation with the revised Section 4 of the 2025 Statement.
So number one being get clear early on on who your evaluation involves. Two is early meaningful consultation and engagement with prospective participant populations or representatives. Three is mechanisms for dynamic risk assessment through the life of evaluation.
Four is taking that intersectional approach to risk assessment. Five is using proportionate case-by-case assessment of risk of harm and the review pathway. And then six is making inclusion the default.
So considering how your research design can be modified and safeguards introduced to ensure that people aren't inappropriately excluded from the research. And just before we wrap up I think it's obviously important to mention that there are a lot more changes to the National Statement than what we've been able to cover today. We've focused on Section 4 and the changes that we felt were most relevant to government evaluators but we'd encourage everyone to go and have a look at the full Statement for yourselves and familiarise yourself with all the updates.
But hopefully this session has helped you understand the context of these changes and what they might mean for your work. All right I think we're ready to get into some of the questions we've received. So we have a question from Lisa.
Do you think these changes mean that evaluations will take longer to complete?
[Eleanor]
Look I think that's a really good question and it probably hits on what's trickiest to navigate about some of these changes if you're involved in government evaluation. I don't necessarily think that these changes mean that evaluations will take longer. I think it does mean that we need to have a shift in where we invest our time and effort.
Bringing it up earlier, making sure that we're engaging people right from the beginning, making sure that we're building a degree of flexibility into our design is really important I think to then being able to efficiently deliver the rest of that evaluation. And we did mention at one point you know one of the challenges can be that if you don't meet the requirements around early engagement and inclusion and modifications from the beginning, it often leads to protracted processes trying to get ethics clearance, difficulty engaging with stakeholders who may not you know it may not work for them, they may not buy into the method that you've got. So I'm hopeful that by really embracing some of the shifts that the revised statement proposes, we can get it right from the beginning and not have those blowouts kind of down the track.
[Emma]
Yeah and hopefully it also ensures that evaluations are delivered with more rigour and that they are a more reliable product at the end because they have taken much broader and more comprehensive assessments of everyone that might be impacted by the program or the evaluation. Yeah I think that's right. All right we also have a question from Mike.
So how can I adapt my evaluation to be more inclusive for people with disabilities and do we have any examples of how we've done it?
[Eleanor]
Look that's a great question and it's interesting that the revised statement has changed the way that it structures and thinks about engagement with people with disabilities, particularly people who might be experiencing you know cognitive disability or complex mental health concerns. It has consolidated a number of different sections. I think that the key piece here is coming back to that idea of modification and inclusion and look at Allen and Clark we've done a range of engagements and evaluations that touch on the space.
What we've found is making sure that we bring lived experience right into the heart of our evaluation process. So are we embedding lived experience, lived experience and living experience wisdom throughout the process and that generally involves bringing a lived experience onto the evaluation team from the outset is really critical. We have looked at how we modify materials, how we modify approaches so that can involve you know a different approach to in-person and online and you know different technological approaches.
It often looks like producing easy English materials. Looking at whether you bring in advocates to support people who may not be able to participate fully without some additional support. So advocates can be a really great addition.
So these are all options. I think the key thing is it's really hard to retrofit these things. So it's about getting it in early.
[Emma]
All right we have a question from Anita. So we spoke to the fact that you're unlikely to default to Human Research Ethics Committee in situations where it's no longer mandatory but you'll still be able to go to ethics committees after conducting an in-house risk assessment. So it sounds like some of the decision making about risk has shifted from the ethics committees to the evaluation.
As an organisation are you changing anything in response to this such as internal policies or our approach to upskilling staff? Do you want to take this one Emma? Sure.
So yes you're right that the decision making about risk has shifted to the evaluators and we will certainly be changing our approaches in response to this delivery of this webinar. It's probably a key example because we put in a lot of research and analysis on the updates to the statement to really understand what the key implications of that are for our organisation and all of the organisations that we work with. We'll be I'm sure reflecting these in our kind of standard methodologies and approaches in design and making sure that our staff really do understand the importance and the context of these changes that we're designing for them from the start.
We're talking to clients about the implications of this and why certain things are included in our proposals and also reflecting that the time and budget allows for that as well.
[Eleanor]
Yeah and I would just add I think another thing that's interesting about the shift in where the emphasis in the assessment sits is I do think we're starting to see some changes in the HREC sector and in particular what we're seeing is more options for lower risk assessment and also at least one provider that I know of that's providing a service to deliver preliminary engagement and preliminary advice and I think that speaks to the fact that organisations such as Alan and Clark, other evaluators, are looking to make sure they're doing the right thing. And so having the option of do it all yourself or do a full review is very binary. I think that in response to some of that flexibility and discretion that's being built into the National Statement we'll continue to see, I hope we continue to see, this trend in the HREC sector to accommodating that middle ground where you may have made a rigorous assessment yourself that this is a lower risk enterprise but you do want to just engage ethics experts to validate that view or challenge it or test it a little bit.
[Emma]
Yeah I think that is a really really great development in that ethics committee sector because as you say there's a big gap between you know no review and ethics review and you know people still want to get some confidence and backing on on their decision and be able to provide that as well to to their you know executives in their own organisation that that the approach has been through sort of some third party expert review. Yeah.
Yeah. All right we have another question from Ryan. Do the changes mean that every study should be recruiting children and young people and people with disabilities?
[Eleanor]
So the short answer here is no. I think what what the changes mean there's two things. The first is that where your evaluation involves either children and young people or people with disabilities and we come back to that that conversation we had around what involvement means under the new statement then the default is that you should include them and if there's a good reason for not including them then obviously that needs to be articulated.
Yeah. But I think it's where your study involves those groups that this whole sort of conversation kicks in. I do think the other aspect of it that is that comes out of the revisions to the national statement is not assuming that your study doesn't involve these groups.
So for example I think people with disabilities is is a really you know good example. We know that a significant proportion of people in the country live with disability. When we are conducting an evaluation that may not be specifically about people with disability, they may not be our sole stakeholder or key stakeholder cohort, we do still need to be thinking are there people in the community that I might be engaging for entirely different reasons that still have accessibility needs.
What do I need to do to make sure that this study is is suitable for them to participate.
[Emma]
Yeah.
[Eleanor]
And is equitable in that sense. So I think they're two dimensions of that.
[Emma]
Yeah.
[Eleanor]
Great. All right. Look I think that's probably a good place to wrap up for today.
So thank you so much everyone for coming along and for sending in your questions. If any of today's discussion has sparked ideas for your own work or you'd like to do a deeper dive into the national statement changes with us we're always happy to continue the conversation. Just click the button on your screen.
But otherwise we'll say thank you again for joining us. We really appreciate it. Have a great rest of your day everyone.
Thank you.
