Our Children’s Health and Maternity programme strives to improve maternal and childhood health across the country. From the very start, patient and public involvement (PPI) has been central to this programme, helping us decide what research to do and where to focus our efforts.
PPI empowers patients and members of the public to work in equal partnership with researchers to shape and conduct research. It is key to producing high-quality research and ensuring its relevance and importance to patients.
The team was keen to share the lessons they had learned about PPI through this process to help improve future PPI and support others. They were also keen to do so in a way that is both engaging and accessible.
Beccy Summers, PenARC Postgraduate Research Associate, shares her experience of being part of this process and the creative and imaginative outputs the team created.
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My mind raced around for several days thinking of potential options, and one idea stood out – what about poetry?? I hadn’t done any work on poetry since secondary school, which is a fair few years away now. But thankfully, a more experienced colleague, Mary Clancy, was willing to share her expertise.
I contacted the public members that were working on the programme to share the idea of co-creating a set of poems to share the learning relating to PPI from the programme. The response from public members was positive and very quickly the Poem Creation Group was formed!
I facilitated an all-day workshop on Thursday 26th September where the Poem Creation Group learnt about the technique of found poetry and began to create a poem that would share the learning related to creating ‘safe spaces’ within PPI. It was a thoroughly interesting day that was enjoyed by all the group, and reignited peoples creative passions. The workshop birthed a truly touching poem that speaks to the importance of involving a broad range of people in research and the passion for positive change that public members bring to research. The Poem Creation Group titled the poem – Holding Spaces.
We originally aimed to create one poem from this workshop. But as the day progressed and the Poem Creation Group reflected upon their experiences and the sources for the found poetry, they felt that a second poem was emerging. This poem was markedly different than the first and identified the role that public members often have in opening peoples eyes to the benefits of PPI in research. The group titled this poem – Passionate Believer.
The poems produced thus far by the Poem Creation Group show the significant emotions entangled in peoples experiences of involvement. Poetry provides a way for people to share an experience as well as the feelings associated with that experience. As such, poetry is a well-suited partner to convey a more complete picture of involvement than more traditional approaches to knowledge sharing in health and social care research. We are still in the process of co-creating the full set of poems for the programme, and we’re excited to see the poems that emerge next!
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This work was supported by NIHR PenARC and ARC Yorkshire & Humber.