Supporting public involvement through the Shared Commitment

Since launching the Shared Commitment to Public Involvement in 2022, we have seen the partnership grow from strength to strength. From a small group of 13 we are thrilled to be entering year 5 with 37 partners. Through the Shared Commitment, our partners pledge support to improving the extent and quality of public involvement across the health and social care sector so that it is consistently excellent.

During the past 12 months, we have taken the following actions to strengthen public involvement in health and social care research in line with our commitments.

Expand opportunities for people with lived experience to shape our work
We regularly promote involvement opportunities across the HRA, from contributing to policy, guidance and process development to taking part in recruitment panels, and we continue to explore new ways to broaden our reach. We have also established a mechanism to ensure the HRA Board receives insight from a wider range of public perspectives.

This past year, we have involved the public in activities to shape our work on 100 occasions. This includes the launch our new strategy, which saw members of the public working with our Research Ethics Committee members to finalise the content of our strategy and help with its promotion. In addition, we have reviewed and updated our payment policy to ensure fair and transparent remuneration for all of our community, aligned with NIHR rates.

Learn from and celebrate good practice
As co-lead of the Shared Commitment we provide secretariat support and facilitate the exchange of best practice and learning through quarterly Learning and Sharing meetings and newsletters. Over past year we’ve held 4 Learning and Sharing meetings, and during these meetings we’ve heard from leading public involvement experts, such as David Wynick and Constance Shiridzinomwa from Bristol Health Partners about a protected characteristics and caring responsibilities data project, Sophie Staniszewska about Pathways to Implementation for Public Engagement in Research (PIPER) and held a workshop with the team behind the UK Standards for Public Involvement.

We also support new partners joining, and growing number of public contributors involved in this work.

Our public contributors’ group are working together on a paper for researchers talking about how better they could support public contributors to be involved in their research.

Demonstrate the benefits of public involvement
In October we published data on public involvement rates in applications reviewed by Research Ethics Committees (REC) from 2023 to 2024. This provides a baseline for assessing the impact and added value of public involvement in research. The data showed that while the percentage of applicants reporting that they had, or would, actively involve the public in their research was 84%, many of the applicants did not provide sufficient information for us to be able to establish the quality of the involvement planned or undertaken.

We continue to promote our best practice principles and encourage researchers to use our public involvement checklist to make sure that they are including the information that the REC needs to know.

Ensure researchers are aware of our Best Practice Principles and understand our expectations
We’ve updated our website to clearly explain our Best Practice Principles and what we expect in applications for approval. We have been encouraging researchers to use participant information standards and design and review principles, which outline how applicants should describe the public involvement activities that informed their materials by sharing information about them at events, in our newsletters and at our Learning and Sharing meetings.

Improve how review committees use insights from public involvement and how they respond to poor involvement
We’ve updated our public involvement checklist for applicants, so Research Ethics Committees receive the information needed to review the quality of involvement—highlighting good practice and identifying where improvement is required.