Public contributors pose the questions on national Public Involvement anniversary

10th March 2025

Bristol Health Partners works with organisations across the UK to bring about changes which will improve public involvement in health and care research. Together these organisations have signed up to a national Shared Commitment to Public Involvement.

Today [10 March 2025] is the third anniversary of the Shared Commitment. This year’s theme is ‘leadership in public involvement’, so we’ve opened the floor to our public contributors to pose questions to our Director, Professor David Wynick.

How has Bristol Health Partners improved patient and public participation in their work and how has this increased equality, diversity and inclusion?

Patient and public involvement has always been a core requirement for all of our Health Integration Teams (HITs) and we have seen this extend and deepen across the partnership overt the last 15 years. We have ensured that the voices of people involved in our HITs are fully involved in our decision-making at the system’s R&I Steering Group (RISG) and our Board. This gives us on-the-ground experience of work in the HITs alongside the lived experience people bring of health and social care. It means we are better able to make decisions with the people who are affected by them.

At every RISG meeting we make space for uninterrupted reflections from our public contributors. This has sparked a change in meeting culture to use more inclusive language, initiated new projects for the partnership and helped all members reflect on the active role they can play in supporting public involvement in their own organisations. We are grateful that public contributors from ethnically diverse communities have felt this to be a safe space to encourage us to focus and improve our work with under-served communities.

With People in Health West of England (a nationally-recognised regional collaborative network), local research infrastructure and our Integrated Care Board we’ve helped set up the diverse Research Engagement Network funded by NHS England. This is helping us all to co-ordinate our work to collaborate in a more sustainable and mutually beneficial way with ethnically diverse and minoritised communities in the region. This network has helped several of our HITs work with communities they have not previously connected with, including our Eating Disorders and Healthy Weight teams.

We have encouraged all of our HITs to focus on addressing health inequities which has been met by a more inclusive approach to working with public contributors. Our HITs have hugely expanded the range of excellent community organisations that they work with, which has brought in greater diversity to their working. We are starting to see HITs employ creative approaches to public involvement with a much deeper understanding of trauma-informed approaches, which means their work can benefit from people who have experienced multiple disadvantage, whilst being fully and safely involved.

We will continue to focus on the core principle of our Partnership that public involvement is essential to our work and success: “nothing about patients without patients”. We are not complacent and know that despite the progress made there is still so much more for us to achieve in working for example with public contributors with learning disabilities. It is vital we include a broad range of people and communities in our work and ensure that we make it an increasingly rich and rewarding experience for those who participate.

How has research supported by Bristol Health Partners improved patient outcomes and patient pathways across the local health system?

We have been privileged to support a wide range of evidence-based improvements locally through our HITs, which you can see chronicled in our annual Impact Reviews. HIT work has led to improvement in care for mental health issues and chronic health conditions, and in promoting equitable and sustainable health and care, for example:

All of these projects have had strong foundations of public involvement through all stages of their development.

In addition, it is great to see our public contributors helping to improve our research and how it is developed. For example, our Stroke HIT has just made this wonderful film to help students and researchers working with people affected by stroke.

What training has been given to patient and public contributors to increase equality, diversity and inclusion schemes in terms of learning and addressing their local health systems? Do they offer a ‘buddy system’?

We are very lucky to have support from People in Health West of England for training in a wide range of approaches for public contributors.

It was fantastic to work with Breathing Fire – a brilliant Black women’s playback theatre company based in Bristol – to develop training on research inclusion which involved several of our public contributors.

It’s important for our public contributors to develop a fuller understanding of the regional health and care system, which helps them in their roles. Mostly we help them to do this through the meetings and discussions we have together, and by partnering with community organisations that have this deep knowledge. We also plan to work with other communities and groups to help provide some of this information at an early stage, ensuring that they also benefit from a better understanding of the drivers and motivation behind the system leaders of our health and care system.

We don’t offer a buddy system yet, what a great idea! We do arrange get-togethers of public contributors to review how things are going and share knowledge and insights, but this type of peer support happens informally. It’s a good idea for us to work on this – thank you.

We are very grateful to all our public contributors across the Partnership. Anything we can do to help support your needs and development has to be a priority. As ever, keep the ideas coming!