Evidence Library

Abstract:

This paper describes the process of user involvement in the development of a research bid.
   
The idea for the research came from a group of parents of pre-term babies. This group had been set up as a support group for parents who felt that aspects of their care had been very poor. They hoped that their involvement in research would help to improve services and make things better for future parents.
   
A chance meeting between the organiser of the support group and a researcher from the RCN Institute led to a partnership being established to develop the bid. The process involved many meetings, a literature search and consultation with an advisory group. This helped to narrow down the parents' broad interests to a clearly defined research question. A key challenge was to keep the parents' ideas central to the bid, at the same time as ensuring it would be viewed as high quality research. 
   
As well as shaping the research question, group members also helped with refining the methods and advising on ethical issues. The researcher concludes that the involvement had a clear impact on the project's aims, methods, ethical acceptability and dissemination plans. They believe that as a result they developed a bid that was more grounded in parents' experience, had more relevant research questions, used more appropriate and sensitive methods and had a strong dissemination strategy to reach out to health care professionals.

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Categories: health
Identifying topics, prioritising and commissioning
Designing research
impact on funding/commissioning
impact on research
impact on research ethics
impact of public involvement
journal article

Date Entered: 2010/09/28

Date Edited: 2012/11/21