In conversation with: Camarie Welgemoed, Honorary Clinical Research Fellow and part-time PhD, currently working as Breast Specialist Superintendent in radiotherapy.
Working within: Radiotherapy at Charing Cross hospital, doing a PhD in the Department of Surgery and Cancer.
We are delighted to announce the NIHR Imperial BRC PPI Grant Scheme is now open until Friday 19 October 2018, 5pm. The purpose of this grant scheme is to support motivated researchers and their teams to undertake meaningful and impactful public and patient involvement that will shape their research and enhance the translation of biomedical research from bench to bedside. As this is our fourth round of funding, we spoke with Dr Candice Roufosse, Senior Clinical Lecturer at the Centre for Inflammatory Diseases about how winning a PPI Grant helped improve their research.
To celebrate National Co-production Week, we sat down with Rosina Malagrida (Head of the Living Lab for Health at IrsiCaixa, Barcelona) to discuss ‘Responsible Research and Innovation’ and what the U.K. can learn from the European example.
Crohn’s Disease and Ulcerative Colitis are the two main forms of inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) and affect more than 300,000 people in the UK. To mark world IBD day, Kapil Sahnan (surgical trainee) and Mark Samaan (gastroenterology trainee) organised and ran a National Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) Research Day for patients with inflammatory bowel disease.
They worked with a team of PPI experts including: Ailsa Hart (UK PPI lead for Gastroenterology), Christine Norton (Professor of Nursing), Nicola Fearnhead (President in waiting of the ACPGBI), Phil Tozer (an academic colorectal surgeon) and two fantastic expert patients (Azmina Verjee and Sue Blackwell).
At the 2018 Imperial Festival we opened the Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) Café for the first time. A new PPI methodology – a hybrid between a science café and a more typical PPI workshop – it was designed by five Imperial research centres in partnership with Patient and Public members.
Our aim was simple: to give the public a flavour of PPI by contributing to real-life research projects. As well as getting fresh public input into some projects, we wanted to try something novel in PPI and to have some fun.
Why a café?
Despite their modern association with tax-dodging and precarious labour, coffee houses have for centuries been associated with free discussion and the exchange of ideas.
Calls are now open for contributions to the 2018 Engage Conference. We hear from Nathan Green and Denise Sime who presented at last year’s conference. They discuss their experience of sharing their learnings on LoL-Lab, a co-created comedy event between Imperial researchers and the public. If you would like to apply to be part of this year’s conference, get in touch with us at ppi@imperial.ac.uk for support with an application.
What is the Engage conference?
Nathan: The National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement (NCCPE) annual conference, Engage 2017, was held over two days in December in Bristol. We saw presenting at this workshop as a fantastic opportunity to share lessons from our own public engagement experience.
Biomedical Engineer Shruti Turner reflects on the recent CRISH (Co-creating Innovative Solutions in Health) course and explains that engineers could learn a lot from PPI.
Public involvement in health and biomedical research is increasingly seen as both desirable and necessary. Desirable because the public’s vast and varied experience can bring important perspectives to research. Necessary because many funders now require it.
That’s why we’ve developed the Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) Resource Hub – to guide researchers through the process of actively involving patients and members of the public in their research and projects.
In conversation with: Dr Lynne Sykes, Academic Clinical Lecturer Working within: Institute of Reproductive & Developmental Biology
With the help of the NIHR Imperial BRC PPI award, we were able to set up a Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) group to help shape our preterm birth research at Imperial. The funding enabled us to invite 10–15 participants to three PPI meetings over a course of 12 months. We now have an established group with around seven core members and one nominated representative. The meetings have been a great way to present, and get feedback, on our current and future research plans.
The hardest thing about submitting a grant application is often not knowing what the judges are looking for. So, with the call now open for this year’s NIHR Imperial BRC Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) grant scheme funding, but the deadline fast approaching, we thought we’d ask both past winners and members of the judging panel to share their thoughts and insights on what makes a winning patient and public involvement proposal…