Patient Experience Research Centre

This blog is aimed at biomedical researchers and those with an interest in public involvement in research. It’s brought to you by the Imperial Patient Experience Research Centre team, otherwise known as PERC. Working in collaboration with the NIHR Imperial Biomedical Research Centre (BRC), we’re dedicated to improving the quality and impact of healthcare and translational research by promoting and supporting active communication between patients, the public, researchers and clinical staff.

At the centre of this is public involvement in research.

• Public involvement is defined as research carried out ‘with‘ or ‘by‘ members of the public, rather than ‘to‘, ‘about‘ or ‘for‘ them
• And by ‘public’, we include patients’, patients’ relatives, carers, and anyone who uses health and social care services

Public involvement is now an essential part of research strategies throughout the UK and rest of Europe. So much so that the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and many other funding organisations now require researchers to provide details of how they will involve patients or the public when they apply for funding.

That’s why we want to share, via this blog, the latest learnings and news from the patient and public involvement (PPI) community, points of views from the team on the advances and issues of public involvement, and case studies or personal stories to inspire new ideas and help ensure consistent, high quality and effective PPI becomes a natural part of Imperial’s research output.

To find out more about PERC and what we do, visit our Patient Experience Research Centre webpage.

The leaflet ‘Involving and engaging the public’ outlines our patient and public involvement and public engagement strategy and showcases examples of involvement and engagement from research groups across the BRC and partners.