Being upfront about public involvement in a primary care study – publishing a PPI protocol

People from different backgrounds having a discussion

11 July 2023

The detailed plans for how patient and public involvement (PPI) will be embedded in a primary care study have been published in the journal Research Involvement and Engagement.

The Personalised Primary Care for Patients with Multimorbidity (PP4M) supports and evaluates a new template for annual reviews for people with multiple long-term conditions. The template allows people to have all their conditions reviewed at once, rather than having separate disease-specific reviews. Its aim is to focus on what matters most to patients.

The paper describes how public contributors will be integral to the data collection and analysis phases of PP4M.

The study includes interviews with primary care staff and patients. Public contributors will help develop questions for these interviews. They will also take part in mock interviews where researchers interview public contributors.

The researchers will work with public contributors to identify learning needs and preferred delivery of learning, and develop qualitative data analysis workshops specifically for public contributors.

The authors write:

“Publishing a record of planned PPI activities and potential impacts demonstrates the rationale and considerations made by the team to ensure that involvement in this study is meaningful and has potential benefits for all involved.

“The team hopes this proposal will support others with the planning and delivery of PPI activities. In future publications, we will reflect on the learnings, challenges, and outcomes from the PPI activities detailed in this proposal.”

Alice Moult, lead author of the protocol and researcher on the PP4M study said:

“Publishing a PPI protocol is fairly unusual. But we wanted to be upfront about our planned PPI activities and the commitment the study team is making to them.

“We also felt that planning for PPI impact might make it more likely that those impacts are realised.”

Paper: A proposal to embed patient and public involvement within qualitative data collection and analysis phases of a primary care based implementation study. Published in Research Involvement and Engagement. June 2023.

Further information

About the Centre for Academic Primary Care (CAPC)

The Centre for Academic Primary Care (CAPC) at the University of Bristol is a leading centre for primary care research in the UK, one of nine forming the NIHR School for Primary Care Research. It sits within Bristol Medical School, an internationally recognised centre of excellence for population health research and teaching.
Follow on Twitter: @capcbristol

About the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR)

The mission of the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR) is to improve the health and wealth of the nation through research. We do this by:

Funding high quality, timely research that benefits the NHS, public health and social care;
Investing in world-class expertise, facilities and a skilled delivery workforce to translate discoveries into improved treatments and services;
Partnering with patients, service users, carers and communities, improving the relevance, quality and impact of our research;
Attracting, training and supporting the best researchers to tackle complex health and social care challenges;
Collaborating with other public funders, charities and industry to help shape a cohesive and globally competitive research system;
Funding applied global health research and training to meet the needs of the poorest people in low and middle income countries.

NIHR is funded by the Department of Health and Social Care. Its work in low and middle income countries is principally funded through UK Aid from the UK government.

The NIHR is the research partner of the NHS, public health and social care.