Vinita Mahtani works for the Canary Islands health care services in Spain. She was asked to identify the needs of health care services of the local people of the Island of El Hierro .

The goal was to develop a specific plan for health care services development for the island of El Hierro. This is an island with 8.000 population where the health care services include primary care and basic hospital care, but that relies for some health care services on the Hospitals in the island of Tenerife. Frequently policy makers manage decisions about health care services organisation independently. In this case, public opinion was included in the report for planning health care services for this island. People who lived in this island were involved in the research process.

Vinita will present in the poster the degree of involvement of the people of El Hierro in the research process. She will show the type of information that was achieved through public opinion that could not have been understood otherwise.

A presentation and explanation of the Maternity Alliance’s User Representation Recruitment and Evaluation Tools, designed to help organisations to recruit consumers/users/lay representatives to steering/working groups and committees. These representatives add great value to research projects. However, our experience told us that insufficient research by an organisation leads to he wrong representatives, and tokenism, on projects. Proper consideration of recruitment should take place early in the research cycle, and good recruitment will resonate throughout the cycle.

The first tool is a detailed questionnaire designed to identify exactly what an organisation is looking for in a representative, and how that representative is expected to help their research.

The second tool provides the lay representative with the chance to record their experiences after their involvement with the organisation has ended. This helps to judge the overall success of a project.

The tool was piloted in 2002 to an enthusiastic response.

The presentation will explain the rationale behind, and development of, the Tools. The format of the Tools, and the results of the pilot will be discussed.

Issues for Discussion:

– the value of lay representatives

– the problem of poor recruitment of lay representatives

– the wide application of our Tools for organisations involved in research

This presentation will draw on the South West Yorkshire Mental Health NHS Trusts experience of setting up, monitoring and evaluating a creativity and mental health project. The Inspire project was a pilot creative arts project employing three artists in residence to lead creative arts activity. Service user participants formed a key part of the project and evaluation team from the outset. The challenge for the evaluation team was to develop methods of evaluation that did not curb the participant’s creativity. However, the team also had to develop evaluation tools that could be used with those participants who did not communicate through language i.e. people with learning disabilities, older people with dementia. The presenters will outline some of the lessons they learnt and will also talk about their innovative methods of disseminating the results of the project and report on some of the positive outcomes for participants.

This workshop will

Describe the work of NICE and existing opportunities for patient, carer and public (user) involvement

Describe the new NICE R&D programme

Involve workshop participants in translating the principles of user involvement into practice to identify roles for patients, carers and the public in the new NICE R&D programme

Discuss ways of disseminating future NICE research recommendations to patients, carers and the public