Being upfront about public involvement in a primary care study – publishing a PPI protocol

The detailed plans for how patient and public involvement (PPI) will be embedded in a primary care study have been published in the journal Research Involvement and Engagement.

The Personalised Primary Care for Patients with Multimorbidity (PP4M) supports and evaluates a new template for annual reviews for people with multiple long-term conditions. The template allows people to have all their conditions reviewed at once, rather than having separate disease-specific reviews. Its aim is to focus on what matters most to patients.

The paper describes how public contributors will be integral to the data collection and analysis phases of PP4M.

The study includes interviews with primary care staff and patients. Public contributors will help develop questions for these interviews. They will also take part in mock interviews where researchers interview public contributors.

The researchers will work with public contributors to identify learning needs and preferred delivery of learning, and develop qualitative data analysis workshops specifically for public contributors.

The authors write:

“Publishing a record of planned PPI activities and potential impacts demonstrates the rationale and considerations made by the team to ensure that involvement in this study is meaningful and has potential benefits for all involved.

“The team hopes this proposal will support others with the planning and delivery of PPI activities. In future publications, we will reflect on the learnings, challenges, and outcomes from the PPI activities detailed in this proposal.”

Alice Moult, lead author of the protocol and researcher on the PP4M study said:

“Publishing a PPI protocol is fairly unusual. But we wanted to be upfront about our planned PPI activities and the commitment the study team is making to them.

“We also felt that planning for PPI impact might make it more likely that those impacts are realised.”