Patient and Public Involvement (PPI)
About Converge
Globally, the number of people living with chronic conditions is increasing. To make sure health services can care for people with chronic conditions to prevent complications and enable people to maintain a good quality of life, we need to understand:
- Who is at risk of chronic condition
- How many people are currently living with a chronic disease – and how well are they living.
- What care pathways and processes are already in place – and how well are they working
The Centre for Chronic Disease and Population Health Research (Converge) is a Science Foundation Ireland (SFI) funded centre of research. Converge aims to transform the way population-level data and research platforms are deployed in Ireland to enable key decisions to be made for prevention and reduction of chronic disease burden. This requires access to good quality information on the population of interest – or population level data.
Population level data
What do we mean by population level data?
When a person interacts with a health service this generates a medical record. This documents the visit, medical procedures undertaken during the visit and medication provided and allows medical professionals to track important information about their patient’s health. At Converge, our goal is to transform the way this information is used to inform decisions around prevention chronic disease, and reducing the burden associated with this.
Where does population level data come from?
When a person interacts with a health service this generates a medical record. This documents the visit, medical procedures undertaken during the visit and medication provided and allows medical professionals to track important information about their patient’s health. At Converge, our goal is to transform the way this information is used to inform decisions around prevention chronic disease, and reducing the burden associated with this.
Why Patient and Public Involvement?
Patient and Public Involvement is defined as:
“‘research carried out ‘with’ or ‘by’ members of the public rather than ‘to’, ‘about’ or ‘for’ them”
It means working with patients, carers, service users or the public in planning, designing, managing, conducting and communicating research. By working with patient and public contributors we want to make sure we are asking the research questions that matter to people living with chronic conditions.
Benefits of Patient and Public Involvement
Patient and public involvement can have benefits for the PPI contributors, the researchers and the public by:
- Ensuring the research questions, and the research being conducted, is important to those who will be affected by the research and subsequent findings.
- Improving the quality of the research being conducted.
- Improving how research findings are being communicated to the general public.
The role of PPI contributors
We aim to hold two in-person meetings per year where all PPI contributors will be invited to hear about the research being conducted by Converge and the impact their contribution has had. During these meetings, we will also work with PPI contributors to identify and prioritise research questions and plan future research. We will also work with PPI contributors to evaluate PPI activities conducted within the centre.
Outside of in-person meetings, we will reach out to PPI contributors with invitations to contribute to our work. This may involve convening online group meetings, one-to-one discussions or communicating via email/phone.
Examples of tasks include:
- Contributing to discussions on research priorities and/or defining research questions,
- Reviewing documents. This may include ethics applications, grant proposals or study recruitment materials.
- Contributing to analysis and interpretation of results from research being conducted.
- Developing lay summaries, and informing communication of research being conducted, and subsequent findings, to ensure research is accessible to the general public.
