Improving patient and public involvement and engagement at the Patient Safety Translational Research Centre

We are currently improving the way we involve and engage with patients and the public across the NIHR Imperial Patient Safety Translational Research Centre, to ensure they are at the heart of what we do. In August, we held an event with 37 patients and members of the public to discuss our future research themes at the Centre and our strategy for patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) in research.

To build on what we learnt from that event, we are bringing together patients, the public, researchers and clinicians to co-produce our PPIE strategy at the end of January. The interactive meeting will be in the creative space of the HELIX Centre and we’ll also be making a film of the day. We are holding a similar event to develop our new communication strategy and hope that members of the public will come up with some really novel ways to communicate about research and reach out to different communities.

We have recently started a priority setting partnership with the James Lind Alliance on patient safety and specialist care. The process involves sending out a survey, as widely as possible, to members of the public, patients and healthcare professionals, to identify their research priorities in this space. The information will be analysed and we’ll carry out a literature review to highlight which areas need further research. The questions that have not been adequately addressed by previous research will be ranked and we will hold a final workshop to define the top 10 research priorities. These priorities will influence our research agenda. We will work to identify sources of funding to tackle these priority questions and we will publicise them to the wider patient safety research community.

A key aim of the PPIE strategy is to support our researchers to carry out meaningful patient and public involvement at all points of the research cycle. We are looking to collaborate with partners and build on existing resources to develop a toolkit to support researchers and appropriately train and support patients and researchers. We are hoping to set up a PPIE Board (to lead the strategic direction of PPIE at the Centre) and a Research User Group. This group will be made up of a diverse group of patients and public members, as a forum for researchers to get feedback on their research ideas. This group will be one of the ways that we facilitate conversations between researchers and patients and the public.

We want to ensure we are linked up with other PPIE activities around Imperial. If you are interested in hearing more about the above, please contact Anna Lawrence-Jones.

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