Abstract
The United Nations’ 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development says we should not leave anyone behind, meaning everyone should have a fair chance to improve their lives without facing poverty, discrimination, or exclusion. This agenda well applies to the field of research and in research, it is important to ask questions that matter to everyone involved. However, there are challenges like cultural differences, trust issues, and power imbalances that make it tough for diverse groups to join research. That is why we need better ways to involve people from minority ethnic groups who may not speak English or have much experience with research. Even though funders say we should involve different kinds of people in health research, it is hard because of cultural, language, and political differences. Therefore, it is important to make sure everyone is on board with the research right from the start. At present, many research groups have made guidance documents or toolkits with advice on how to involve different people in clinical trials, guideline development, research priority setting, and systematic reviews. They focus on being fair and making sure everyone is included. Even though these guidance documents say patients and the public should help make healthcare rules, there is not much information about how non-English-speaking minority ethnic groups can join in. So, we suggest a toolkit to help involve people from different ethnic and language groups in research. We looked at information and what we learned from three projects where people from different ethnic groups and who spoke different languages were involved. Using this, we made a toolkit called the MultiEthno-Linguistic Toolkit (MELT) to help get stakeholders involved in the research process.