PPI: The Advantages Of Involving Patients in Clinical Research

Advantages

“PPI can help ensure that the research questions address the needs of the patients. It can help in designing interventions by maximising their benefits to patients while minimising any disadvantages. This can be true of any intervention from a drug to a new therapy to a different way of running a service. PPI can also help ensure that any outcome measure chosen has real-world relevance. All this can contribute to more patient-centric clinical trial designs which in turn can lead to better recruitment and retention and a greater chance that the work will have an impact on real-world  healthcare and patients.”

PPI Toolkit

“The PPI Toolkit is a useful resource for developing PPI in all stages of the medicine development life cycle. I think more people are becoming aware of PPI and are interested in trying it out but are unsure how to start. We hope the toolkit will help with that. On a larger scale I think it’s important that research funders start requiring proof of PPI in bid development as a pre-condition for funding. I also think relevant patients and members of the public should be members of funding panels to review PPI plans and assess the potential patient benefit of new research.”

“There are positive signs that PPI is becoming more commonplace in clinical research across Europe”

Academic Papers

“We wrote several academic papers exploring different aspects of public involvement, including the experiences of principal investigators doing PPI, differing practices in public involvement across Europe and our own experiences of setting up the public advisory group for COMBACTE-MAGNET.  We hope these papers together with the Toolkit will provide resources which will support researchers to embark on public involvement.”