Building a new PPI community from a CLAHRC programme: Creating lenses to focus CLAHRC East of England participation multidimensional perspectives

2014 Conference

Abstract: The Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) East of England which links universities, NHS Trusts and other regional health and social care organisations and communities, is developing patient and public involvement (PPI) across several dimensions of its programme of research. It has a specialist PPI theme group tasked with developing a PPI research portfolio of PPI-specialist topics as well as with encouraging PPI to be embedded across the whole programme. These will need to recognise and encompass diverse approaches to and ways of recognising ‘high quality’, relevant and meaningful research. To achieve this will entail identifying and using research and action ‘lenses’ to focus issues of culture, process and ownership, for a new “PPI community” is to be built which can engage in research collaborations.

A key aim is to learn from and share lessons through case studies and narratives about the dynamics at work here. Current plans include:

• enabling different kinds of PPI representation and experience in our work by building on existing networks including relevant voluntary organisations and regional Healthwatch memberships
• using action research and Normalisation Process Theory approaches to build working knowledge about the implementation experiences of and range and quality of impacts from embedding PPI within a developing programme
• identifying level and type of resources, communication and training needed by all PPI partners (researcher, clinical and lay) for PPI to be effective.

We will actively encourage audience perceptions of our selection and use of ‘lenses’ to encourage convergences and collaborations and enhance awareness of potential refractions and divergences.

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