Readiness to Engage Workbook
Patient and Community Engagement
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Overview
Questions for research teams & partners to consider when planning and evaluating patient and public engagement.
Who this workbook is for
These questions are intended for use by research team members (including researchers, healthcare practitioners, policy- and decision-makers, people with lived/living experience of a health issue, informal caregivers, families, and communities). Questions are for completion individually and as a team (as outlined in the header for each section) to critically reflect on personal values, experiences, interests, beliefs and political commitments in the area of health that the team will be researching, how these impact the research, and how to ensure equity, diversity, inclusion and safety are addressed in planning an engagement strategy for health research. This workbook also includes questions for research teams to consider, together with patient, public and community partners, in evaluating the engagement activities used in the research project.
Need to create safety
Reflection and discussion of these questions may give rise to strong emotions. For these reasons, we recommend considering ways to ensure a safe space is established among team members by discussing what safety means together and using these concepts to develop guiding principles for moving forward with critical reflexive practice as a team. Other strategies that may be useful for addressing tension and conflict include taking time to debrief following particularly challenging discussions, check-ins with individual team members as needed, self care for teams and individuals, and ensuring time is taken to acknowledge and respect all voices involved.
Sources
These questions are adapted and expanded upon from questions included in the 2017 BMC Health Services Research article Moving towards a more inclusive patient and public involvement in health research paradigm: the incorporation of a trauma-informed intersectional analysis by Carolyn Shimmin, Kristy D. Wittmeier, Josée Lavoie, Evan D. Wicklund and Kathryn M. Sibley. This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium.
This workbook was co-developed with the primary author, Carolyn Shimmin, and edited by Patricia Roche.
Version 1.1 updated September 1, 2021