Patient and Public Involvement for Wellcome Multimorbidity PhD Students

Within the Advanced Care Research Centre (ACRC), we strive to ensure Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) is at the heart of everything we do. We believe it is an important approach to advance health research and contributes to innovation that can target complex issues such as, multimorbidity. This refers to people living with two or more long-term health conditions.

As part of our Multimorbidity PhD Programme for Health Professionals funded by The Wellcome Trust, we organised a PPI afternoon to provide the PhD students with an opportunity to explore PPI in their research. It was a dedicated session for students to broaden their understanding of PPI and provide them with insights from an experienced public contributor in our network of over 60+ members across the UK.

The afternoon consisted of students presenting their current PPI strategies and receiving feedback from ACRC Programme Manager, Dr Lucy McCloughan, ACRC PPI Co-ordinator, Daria Inhatenko and ACRC PPIE Officer, Anna Crawford. The next stage was inviting Sue Underwood to speak on her experiences with patient and public involvement – including both challenges and successes. This provided students the opportunity to fully engage with the session and ask questions on implementing PPI in multimorbidity research.

The event provided an opportunity for students to network with a PPIE contributor and encouraged a collaborative, inclusive approach. PhD students were also able to obtain unique insights that can shape their research. Overall, events such as these hold a pivotal role in informing students of PPI and shaping them to be future leaders in industry. We look forward to the next one!