Participant newsletter 2024/25: Take part
Meet the Participant Advisory Group
You, our participants, are at the heart of UK Biobank and in many cases you know best how we can get things right.
Our Participant Advisory Group (PAG) plays a central role in ensuring we hear and act upon the views and opinions of our participants. The 18 members bring an inspiring range of life experiences to help guide our work.
The PAG provides advice on a wide range of activities including:
- communication with participants and the public
- resolving issues relating to collecting, storing and sharing participant data
- designing UK Biobank studies.
In 2024, the PAG helped to develop a new strategy for involving participants in our work, advised us on the new UK Biobank website, and gave their views on requests from researchers to access UK Biobank data.
Get in touch
We are always looking for participants who are willing to get involved and provide their views on UK Biobank’s work. You do not need to have any prior knowledge of health research.
Please email ppierecruitment@ukbiobank.ac.uk to express your interest and we will be in touch. We would love to hear from you.
Online health questionnaires
Our online health questionnaires are a great way for you to give us valuable information from the comfort of your own home!
You can log in to the Participant Area of the UK Biobank website and fill in questionnaires at any time. You can save your answers and come back later if you don’t want to complete the whole questionnaire in one go.
We work with expert researchers from around the world to write our questionnaires. We use questions that have been proven to get reliable and meaningful answers.
Different participants respond to different questionnaires, but we have had more than 2.3 million responses in total! We are truly grateful.
Researchers combine your questionnaire responses with other data you have given us to understand what influences health.
Currently, we have five questionnaires open:
Rest assured – your sleep data is now available to researchers
A huge thank you to the 180,000 participants who have completed our sleep questionnaire. It includes a whopping 138 questions about sleep quality, impact on work and family history of sleep. The information you have provided so far was released to researchers in March 2025.
You may be interested to know…
- 44,871 consider yourself to be definitely a morning-type
- 14,689 consider yourself to be definitely an evening-type
Read our latest news stories on the release of your sleep data
- On a typical night, many of you are waking up several times in the night:
- But most of you are fairly good sleepers. You said your sleep quality on a typical night was:
Your feedback
Thank you to the 33,000 of you who completed our 2024 survey and told us about your communication preferences!
We are using your feedback to improve how we communicate with you. It has already helped us create this brand new website, and we plan to send more regular email newsletters in future.
The vast majority of you always read the newsletter, whether you get it by email or post.
Some of you use Facebook but most don’t use social media channels.
Most of you have a device of some kind, like a computer or a smart phone.
There is interest in a UK Biobank app where you could answer questions about your health and keep in touch
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