Patient and Public Involvement (PPI)

Like to get involved in chronic disease research as a patient or public representative?

  • Do you live in the Republic of Ireland?
  • Do you have experience living with, or caring for someone with one or more of the following conditions: Pre diabetes, Type 2 diabetes, Type 1 diabetes, Gestational diabetes, COPD, or Conditions affecting the heart or blood vessels?
  • If yes to the above, please register your interest  here

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 one in-person meeting 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 this meeting, 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 online group meetings, one-to-one discussions or communicating via email/phone.

Examples of tasks include:

  • 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 plain language summaries, and informing communication of research being conducted, and subsequent findings, to ensure research is accessible to the general public.