Yesterday Sharon Gordon, ACHDS Programme Co-ordinator, and Boyd Ross, one of our Public Research Partners, gave a presentation at the NHS Research Scotland (NRS) and Chief Scientist Office (CSO) Patient and Public Involvement Event at the V&A Dundee.
The team outlined the approach to public involvement in the Networked Data Lab (NDL). The NDL is funded by The Health Foundation and has 5 sites across the UK to undertake novel data linkage analyses to address health inequalities.
The NDL has a Patient and Public Involvement & Engagement (PPIE) workstream and co-produced a framework to guide PPI activities, with the Health Foundation, and the PPI leads and public partners across the NDL, so that the public is involved at every stage of the research process. The NDL funding enabled the Grampian team to set up a dedicated PPIE group. The group has had up to 10 members each bringing a wealth of insights from their experiences in work and life and the team routinely work with a core group of 7 Public Research Partners.
The NDL aims to do a different data analysis each year and coming out of the pandemic in 2022 we looked at access to children and young people’s mental health services in Grampian and then in 2023 NDL Grampian assessed whether access to mental health services is different for children and young people listed on the child protection register.
The PPIE team had 11 online and hybrid meetings with the ACHDS PPIE Group and three workshops with advocates for children and young people to support these related analyses.
Boyd couldn’t attend the event in person so recorded his part of the presentation, describing some of the outcomes of the discussions with the PPIE group and other activities the group have helped with.
Some of the direct impacts from the recommendations that came from the PPI discussions were described. Boyd and Sharon emphasized the importance of having dedicated PPIE funding as part of research grants to create dedicated PPIE champions in our public partners and within the academic research community, and to support them to be involved and to involve the public more in research.
Please get in touch if you would like any more information about the NDL or our PPIE Group and activities – achds@abdn.ac.uk