Patient and Public Involvement

The programme has lay representation to contribute views, questions and oversight from the perspectives of health service users.

Overview of our PPI strategy

Our lay co-applicants will be given appropriate financial and administrative support to implement the agreed PPI strategy, working in collaboration with our senior Programme Manager. Our PPI members have acquired relevant experience of PPI in health research, including leading the PPI strategy for our current ePrescribing work. 

Our recent Programme Grants for Applied Research has enabled a motivated and active group of lay representatives, who are now familiar with research methods and have domain-specific knowledge in relation to prescribing in hospitals. We will continue working with some of these individuals thereby ensuring we have two experienced lay representatives participating in the Programme Management Group meetings, along with the lay co-applicants, and another two PPI members serving on the Independent Programme Steering Committee. This strategy reflects what we have previously learnt works well for achieving meaningful lay input across the whole of the programme of work. In addition, our current PPI Group identified specific PPI contributions to the proposed individual work packages, in each case aiming to ensure that the wider ‘voices’ of patients and the public remained prominent throughout the work.

This will entail a series of lay-led, health service users’ focus groups to be convened by our PPI members, particularly getting patients’ and carers’ views on how ePrescribing can support antimicrobial stewardship. The PPI Group will review all research protocols, patient information leaflets and consent forms, advise on recruitment of sites, contribute to development of the intervention and interpretation of results, and edit lay summaries for all of the publications. The PPI Group will also be instrumental in developing public-facing information on using ePrescribing to promote antimicrobial stewardship. The PPI Group will ensure that all papers have accessible lay summaries and will disseminate findings both in oral and written forms.

In terms of support and training, we plan regular meetings for the lay members to meet up and to discuss their experiences and to reflect on how their input can be improved. New lay members will be offered the NIHR “Building Research Partnerships” training, and further bespoke training using the online INVOLVE training resources.

For further information contact Mr Antony Chuter (chuter@me.com)