Guiding research with your experience.
Public involvement is at the heart of our work, which focuses on areas prioritised and informed by patients, carers, community members, and clinicians. This makes it vitally important that we meaningfully involve and engage members of the public.
With projects that address mental health from birth all the way to young adulthood, our teams are working across a variety of contexts from family centres to schools and clinics. Through this work, we hope to engage with young people, families, and communities in ways that will benefit them, and also allow their experiences to guide our work.
There are different ways that the public can inform and shape research. You may see different names and acronyms – Patient and Public Involvement, Public Engagement, Participation, PPI, PPIEP…
“Public involvement means that research is carried out ‘with’ or ‘by’ members of the public rather than ‘to’, ‘about’ or ‘for’ them.”
Definition from National Institute for Health Research
Rather than simply taking part in a study, members of the public share their views and experiences to prioritise, plan, evaluate, and share health and social care research.
Public engagement refers to activities or events where information about and findings from our research are shared with the public. It is a ‘two-way process involving interaction and listening, with the goal of generating mutual benefit’ (National Coordinating Centre for Public Engagement).
Benefits to the public include
Benefits to researchers and others supporting PIE
We are keen to put Public Involvement and Engagement at the centre of all of our research since learning from lived experience is a key part of our goals. Some of the ways in which we plan to do this are through our Parent Carer Research Network, our networks for schools and early years services, and our long-term birth cohort studies. Through our INSiGHTS team, we also seek to develop new methods to involve young people in research, with the goal of expanding and empowering participants.
In partnership with the Charlie Waller Trust, we are developing a research network for parents and carers with lived experience to meaningfully contribute to research relating to young people’s mental health. The network will provide opportunities and support parents and carers to get involved in research. It will also provide guidance and resources for researchers looking to work with parents and carers. We’d love you to join the network!
Investigating and developing innovative methods to involve young people and communities in research, so they are at the centre of the work we do. In partnership with the University of Birmingham and charity partners.
A coproduction project gathering feedback on a digital intervention to help with adolescent social anxiety and adapt it to make it more accessible and usable by a larger range of young people, including those from backgrounds normally underrepresented in research and mental health services.
Researchers at the University of Oxford worked with gender diverse young people and young people from marginalised backgrounds to co-create a new Young Person’s Advisory Group (YPAG) together. The group discussed best practice around setting up YPAGs and worked on several coproduction projects and resources.