Public Involvement

All of the below relate to public involvement for my NIHR doctoral research fellowship. Some additional material is available on Padlet, where you can post comments on any of the below without the need for an account (a brief intro to Padlet is given here).

Plain English Summaries

Summary from Application form. This describes my plans for both the research as a whole, and specifically how public involvement would occur. This was written prior to the project starting, so it will be useful to compare how my plans have evolved over time!

Public Involvement Standards Freestyler Project

These standards were launched in March 2018 as a means with the aim to improve both the quality and consistency of public involvement activities. There are six standards, covering themes such as "inclusive opportunities", "support and learning" and "impact". Each standard includes three to five indicators, which describe how the standard should be met. More details on the standards and indicators can be found here.

I have registered my PhD fellowship to be a  'freestyler' for the standard "inclusive opportunities". This means that I shall be testing the indicators for this standard in my project, to see how they can help. I chose this standard as I am interested in how best to involve members of the public within methodological projects such as mine, where there is currently little specific guidance.

As part of the 2018 interactive workshop (see below) we discussed the challenges of providing inclusive opportunities with methodological research. The results of this discussion, and how they relate to the indicators for inclusive opportunities are provided here.

Year two workshop

This was held on 16 August 2018. There were two parts to the workshop. The first part discussed progress on the project since the previous meeting, as well as plans for next year (the third and final year of the project). The second part reflected on the new national standard for inclusive publicopportunities, and how they relate to this type of methodological work. We discussed areas that could be improved for future methodological projects with reference to these standards and indicators.

Slides from the workshop are available here. An overview of the discussions and how they relate to the Public Involvement Indicators can be found in the 'Freestyler Project' above. Note from the workshop along with evaluations by both the PAG and myself are available here.

Year one workshop

As detailed in the Application form Plain English Summary (above), I originally planned to hold a prioritisation event at the start of the fellowship. This would involve my presenting on the potential methodological approaches that the fellowship would cover. Stakeholders (the PAG, representatives from academia and industry, and decision makers from NICE) would then prioritise these (in a type of Delphi exercise). Unfortunately this did not happen; mainly because it took me most of the first year of the fellowship to sufficiently understand the methods available for prioritisation (this in itself is a useful learning outcome).
Instead, I altered my public involvement plans to instead collaboratively discuss how best to involve members of the public in methodological work. I felt that this would be beneficial, as there are very few examples of this type of involvement, so public involvement could help to identify suitable types of involvement.
To discuss this, I help an interactive workshop with the PAG. This involved informal training to provide a background to the proposed work, along with discussions about types of involvement. The training materials (slides) are available here, and an overview of the event with evaluation (from both the PAG and myself) are available here.

Pre-application workshop

In support of my NIHR application, I held an interactive workshop to discuss my plans (both the research and public involvement) with members of the public. A report on this activity is available here. I found the input to be both useful and encouraging, and some of the people who attended later agreed to join the Patient Advisory Group (PAG) for the fellowship.

Three Minute Thesis Talk.

This is a competition to describe your walk to the public within three minutes. You may use one slide (without animation). I entered this during the summer of 2017 (so about 6 months into my fellowship). A recording of my talk, and the slide, can be found below. I was shortlisted for the Faculty finals, which is more than I was expecting! Overall I found this to be an enjoyable experience, and it helped to refine my thinking about what I wanted to do with the fellowship.

Video of talk.
Supporting slide.