Women and Children PPIE Support Sessions

Overview

Throughout October 2016, the Public Programmes Team ran free support sessions on Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPI/E) for researchers working in women or children’s health. The sessions were run on behalf of the Manchester Academic Health Sciences Centre (MAHSC).

Aims

  • To increase the knowledge and confidence of Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement  of researchers across Greater Manchester.
  • To provide practical support writing grant applications, and implementing the practical elements of delivering PPI/E.
  • To encourage researchers to embed PPI/E as early as possible within their research projects.

What we did

Three sessions took place, one at MFT, one at The Christie NHS Foundation Trust and one at the University Hospital of South Manchester NHS Foundation Trust. They sessions were open to researchers employed by a MAHSC partner organisation, delivering research involving women and/or children.

At the sessions each researcher had up to an hour of the Public Programme Team’s time to receive bespoke advice and support regarding patient and public involvement and engagement (PPI/E) in their clinical research project(s).

All researchers who were attended the sessions became eligible to receive further PPIE support from the Public Programmes Team funded by MAHSC. applications, implementing PPIE

PPIE Event

PPIE support session

Impact

Researchers who took part in the sessions were asked to complete a survey evaluating their usefulness.

The feedback was overwhelmingly positive, with the majority of researchers responding that the sessions were ‘extremely helpful’.

Kylie Watson, NIHR Clinical Doctoral Fellow at Saint Mary’s Hospital, who took part in one of the sessions said:

It was so helpful to meet the Public Programmes Team and have some time to discuss how I can get women involved with different aspects of my research.

Next steps

The Public Programmes Team will provide additional support to those researchers selected by MAHSC until March 2017.

This work was funded by MAHSC