Critical Care does PPI

Tuesday evening I had a fantastic time. It was the first meeting for the Critical Care Patient and Public Involvement Group in Edinburgh.

Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) in Scotland is no where near as organised as it is in England and funding is woeful, so to establish and run a group is a huge undertaking but for us as patients it makes a huge difference. We see the dedication of the organisers to make life better for those in the PPI group.

I have been really privileged with this group as I have been able to help advise the group organiser and how to do it and was invited to speak alongside Allison who I do a lot of talks with for the first meeting. Having been involved in the set up of the SPEAK Asthma group, it was good to be able to advise on this one and work with the group lead.

It was great for the initial meeting to have a combination of patients, clinicians, researchers, advisors all chatting about involvement and research. What I did find is how difficult it is to define and explain PPI to patients but also researchers. It was clear some researchers thought PPI was more about patient recruitment than involvement but also that they have their clear idea of their research and how it is going to be done which is good however if this is their thinking then PPI is not going to work especially if the patients do not think the method of research is going to be beneficial. The key thing with involving patients in the research process is listening. You must listen to the patients and their views. You may not agree with what they say and think because you have research under your belt then you have the expertise but it is patients you nee to recruit so if those you use for PPI don’t think it is a good design then you can be pretty sure that your participants won’t be interested either.

However not all the researches were like this and some of their research has been really well thought out and they explained it in a manner that everyone could understand and get a real feel for the project. It is a real skill to be able to translate from academic speak to everyday speak so those who can they have the art!!!!

Having a unit like Critical Care want to set up a PPI group is really positive. Medicine is advancing so much and improving patient care and treatments. Patients in critical care are pretty unwell so often hard to speak to them about research and get them involved because when your there you are not in the best of health and research is the last thing on your mind. It was clear at the first group meeting though that the patients really valued the expertise in critical care and by them getting involved in PPI is them giving something back to the unit that looked after them.

The tricky thing is reaching out to those patients once they leave critical care or the hospital as even once out critical care and on a ward they may still not be feeling great so would not want to be given loads and loads of information as they are still processing what has just happened. If anyone reading this has ideas of how to gain more people for the PPI group (ideally in Edinburgh) please leave me a comment.

The exciting part is that there was such a positive response and watching everyone interact was great. A first meeting for anything is hard and you never know what to expect so for the organisers it has been a success I would say. It is sad though that they have had to put so much work in and I am sure many many hours of unpaid time to set up and organise such a group and event that it is not always possible for areas to do that or have the staff dedicated to setting up, running, facilitate and maintain a group.

The benefit is though that if the group can be advertised and grow then others might set groups up for their research areas having seen the positive impact PPI has had for others. The more groups then hopefully the more publicity and PPI may have more of an agenda in Scotland and research groups which would perhaps result in more funding and PPI groups can have a network across the whole of Scotland and all types of research can get enhanced by PPI and not just be a tick box exercise!!!