Is that the right question?

Just reflecting on all the stimulating discussions I had at the ‘International Perspectives on Evaluation of Patient & Public Involvement in Research Conference’…

One of the first things the participants were asked was whether the impact of involvement should be measured. The audience was split pretty much 50:50 I seem to remember. I wondered if this would change over the two days – but my overall sense was that the ‘measurement’ and the ‘non-measurement’ people went off into different rooms, choosing the talks that fitted best with the ideas they already came with…

It feels like the field is polarised and a bit stuck in this binary decision. This always prompts me to think we must be asking the wrong question. Dave Green, a patient contributor, really cut through it all when he said what really matters is whether involvement achieves culture change, to generate more relevant research and change the way research gets done.

Isn’t this the question the PPI community should be asking itself? If involvement was genuinely delivering the outcomes we’d like to see, what would that look like? Research that’s actually useful to the public and improving their lives? If that’s what we want, then how do we know if that’s happening? That might mean measuring some things, but it might not. The choice of method would need to be fit for purpose. And as always, it might simply mean asking the patients…