Blog: Trying to be more Co-productive

Edinburgh Clinical Research Facility (ECRF) was the first research facility in Scotland to have a dedicated Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) Advisor role within its Education team. Someone who actively worked with the clinical research community to guide them through including patients and members of the public in the different stages of their research process; offering the potential to improve PPI in research while ensuring that those involved were also active collaborators in the research.

The PPI Advisor also worked to engage patients and community members in research and collaborations including involving patients in the design and delivery of its training for researchers. In Edinburgh we have a Patient Advisory Group (PAG), many of whom have ongoing health conditions, and who have passion about actively supporting and contributing to the improvement of research and clinical practice. These relationships have been built and maintained over many years and are valued and nurtured. 

 ECRF has run many courses over the years for researchers in Patient Public Involvement so when lockdown began in March, the Education Team, the PPI Advisor and the ECRF Patient Advisory Group had to rethink how they could continue working collaboratively and how to deliver the training courses in a different way.  All of our training courses in PPI involve members of the PAG in their delivery and so we wanted to continue this collaborative model.

We decided to develop a video version of our Good Practice Guide to Patient Public Involvement and because of social distancing we couldn’t record ourselves together, the panel members made revisions to each iteration and made numerous suggestions to improve

Working co-productively and collaboratively isn’t always the easiest or quickest way to get from A to B but potentially is a lot more valuable.  Although we haven’t quite got there in working co-productively we are making steps towards a sharing of decisions and power and aiming to work co-productively for the benefit of patients and researchers in the clinical research community. 

Danielle Marlow: Development Coordinator

Carol Porteous: patient & Public Involvement Advisor