Last month, our Senior Manager for Engagement and Research Development Evelyn Tehrani gave a presentation to the partners of the Health Research Authority’s Shared Commitment to Public Involvement.
In 2022, the Health Research Authority, along with 12 other leading health and social care organisations, launched the Shared Commitment to Public Involvement in Health and Social Care Research. In the three years since its inception, more organisations have joined this, with the Commitment now having over 32 signatories including the National Institute for Health and Care Research, the McPin Foundation, NCCPE, NHS England and Universities UK.
The Shared Commitment recognises that public involvement and engagement of individuals with lived experience improves both the quality and impact of health and social care research. It aims to improve the standard of such research by committing partners to promoting public involvement and promoting best practice. It is intended to shape the way in which partner organisations, their members and researchers that they support fund and regulate conduct public involvement and engagement in research. Patients and the public should be involved in influencing research topics, designs and approaches The Shared Commitment also encourages partners to embed public involvement within their own governance systems.
Similar commitments are embedded within the work of the Platform which promotes centring lived experience in our research, engaging diverse perspectives in our research and advisory structures, and renumerating people from the public, community sector and health sectors for their time contributions to our research development work.
Evelyn was therefore delighted to be invited to present to the members of the Shared Commitment and the approach being taken in the Discovery Research Platform for Medical Humanities. Her presentation provided an overview of medical humanities, highlighting how insights and methods from the arts, humanities and social sciences can improve understandings of experiences of health and illness, particularly those related to mental health and health inequalities. Evelyn also drew attention to the role cross-sector and lived experience perspectives play in the development of research projects within the Platform and the governance structures and commitments which enable engaged research to happen. These include our Strategic Engagement Group and International Advisory Board, as well as our new Medical Humanities in Practice Research Fellowship scheme which supports researchers from the health, voluntary and community sectors to undertake research on a critical issue they have encountered in their practice. Our recruitment processes also encourage applications from scholars with expertise in race and health, neurodiversity and lived experience research and those who face marginalisation in academia. For example, the Platform is home to the UK’s first Associate Professor of Lived Experience Research, Dr Veenu Gupta.
In closing, Evelyn emphasised how we are continually reflecting on our ways of working and striving to improve the way we support and enhance engagement with lived experience in research. Her presentation was very well received. We look forward to continuing to work with members of the Shared Commitment to Public Engagement to achieve our shared goals of promoting engagement in health research and driving up standards in health through high-quality public involvement.
