MLTC-M Community of Practice in ECR training on best practice patient and public involvement with diverse populations

Recruiting and supporting patients and the public to get involved in health research can be challenging for junior researchers, especially when the people they want to speak to have two or more long term health conditions. We want to set up a 'Community of Practice' to help junior researchers, patients and members of the public learn from one another about health research and all the different ways people can get involved.
Our community will include researchers, patient representatives and public involvement organisers from several research projects studying people affected by two or more long term health conditions. We will meet, both face to face and online, to share our experiences and the various approaches we have taken to reaching and involving people from as many different backgrounds as possible. This will include everything from setting up a research project to sharing the results at the end. We will also train junior researchers in how to assess how well an approach is working, in different settings and health conditions, and help them set up a support network.
We will share the lessons we have learned with other researchers and patient groups. We hope that this will result in patient and public involvement in research into long term conditions that is respectful and represents a wide cross section of the UK population. This in turn will lead to findings that reflect the concerns of patients and the public, and health care and treatments that fit with the reality of people's lives.

The work plan will be defined based on individual needs but provisionally will include a combination of face-to-face and online meetings, focus groups and one-to-one interviews. It is anticipated that two face-to-face meetings will be conducted; one workshop at the start of the project and a second at the end to discuss dissemination and sustainability strategies. PPI meetings, discussions with public representatives, expert-led seminars and strategy sharing workshops will be conducted online. A Working Group will be established to: oversee the delivery of the project and reflect, report on, and disseminate learnings; plan for how the CoP will be sustained beyond the lifetime of the Collaboratives; and identify funding streams and strategies for ongoing future engagement of the CoP.
A 'sandpit' workshop will take place to understand the needs, expectations and challenges of ECRs around PPI in MLTC research. Sandpits are "workshops that bring together researchers from different institutions and disciplines to discuss a specific topic or problem" to create "intensive discussion forums where free thinking is encouraged" and where "lateral thinking through role play, small group work and brainstorming activities" are arranged.
Following this, focus groups or interviews will be conducted to understand the perspectives of patients, and skills-building workshops will be delivered to enable ECRs to be better informed and equipped to enhance their own PPI practices. Collaboratives will share strategies on ways to embed diverse voices within PPI and identify areas for future improvement; and a strategy will be developed for the dissemination of guidelines and tools for evaluating the impact of PPI, based on shared learning across Collaboratives.
Our preliminary discussions have already highlighted some challenges that participating Collaboratives are currently facing and the need for shared learning on strategies to embed diverse populations into PPI in MLTC research.