Celebrating the value public involvement brings to health and care research
- 10th March 2026
Today [10 March 2026] we’re celebrating the 4th anniversary of the Shared Commitment to Public Involvement in health and social care research by putting our public partners and contributors centre stage.
Public involvement improves the quality and impact of research. The best public involvement is inclusive, values all contributions, ensures people have a meaningful say in what happens and influences outcomes, as set out in the UK Standards for Public Involvement.
More than 50 public partners and contributors are now embedded in our Health Integration Teams (HITs) and our partnership structures. Here are just a few of them explaining, in their own words, why they’re involved:
Aneta
Aneta supports our Stroke HIT. She says:
“I try to use my experience to be helpful and supportive for people in a comparable situation to mine, and to improve the system too… My being able to share experiences like this with people who can change things can only be positive.”
Learn more about Aneta’s story
Carl and Chrissy
Carl and Chrissy work with our Self-harm Matters HIT and help deliver a trauma-informed training programme for researchers in the region. They say:
“It’s important to have people like us in the room who have been in the position of the clients. It makes a lot more sense than only having people who have studied [mental health]… I’ve lived it. It affects me every moment of every day. So being there means we’re actually helping to make decisions about the support that people get.”
Soumeya
Soumeya supports our Kidney Disease and Adversity & Trauma HITs, sits on our Research and Innovation Steering Group and co-chairs the region’s diverse Research Engagement Network. She says:
“Good public contributors must voice their experiences but also disassociate from them to an extent to see different points of view, put themselves in other people’s shoes and have the capacity to understand others. I don’t want to only represent people like me – although that’s important – I want to speak on behalf of anyone who doesn’t feel able to do so. I think a public contributor must be a representative but also an advocate.”
