Supporting the UK Standards for Public Involvement

Members of the Shared Commitment were delighted to have the opportunity to meet with the UK Standards for Public Involvement oversight group to discuss how we can better support and promote the standards.

The standards set out what good public involvement looks like and are designed to improve the quality and consistency of public involvement across the health and social care sector.

The standards are:

• a framework for what good public involvement in research looks like and are adaptable to different situations
• designed to encourage reflection and learning, including where lessons have been learned when public involvement has failed to lead to expected outcomes
• a tool to help people and organisations identify what they are doing well, and what needs improving
• intended to be used with any method or approach to public involvement in research

They can be used in different ways. Members of the public and community groups can use the standards to assess the strengths and weaknesses of their involvement in research and identify improvements. Researchers can use the standards to review their plans for public involvement. Research funders and charities can use them to assess how public involvement is being implemented in projects and organisations they support.

The discussion with the oversight group took place at our Shared Commitment to Public Involvement Learning and Sharing meeting on 5 August 2025. The meetings, which take place quarterly, bring together public contributors and public involvement leads from the 31 organisations who are part of the Shared Commitment to share knowledge and best practice, and discuss barriers and challenges.

As the standards were developed more than six years ago, a lot has changed in that time in how public involvement takes place, so it was a good time to review them.

For the meeting on the UK Standards, the 60 attendees split into breakout groups to discuss the following questions:

• what are people’s experiences of the UK Standards use, how do they land, is the guidance good enough, are there changes that people have heard suggested?
• how do we keep the standards current (making sure groups don’t start re-inventing the wheel)?

There was agreement that the standards are a very important resource to help improve public involvement, as they are applicable to most involvement activities and they have stood the test of time.

Suggestions were made that all the Shared Commitment partners could do more to promote them, provide case studies and sector specific examples of their use, add to a library of resources and living updates in the Learning for Involvement website and consider updates relating to safeguarding, accountability and care for people involved.

The Shared Commitment partners were urged to better signpost to the UK standards website and talk about how they are used.

The UK Standards oversight group will be reviewing the feedback over the coming months and will be deciding how a refresh of the standards could be completed with the resources available.

Background

The UK Standards for Public Involvement were developed over a period of three years from 2016 to 2019 by a Public Involvement Standards Development Partnership, with representatives from the National Institute of Health Research (NIHR), Health and Care Research Wales, Health and Social Care Research Northern Ireland, The Chief Scientist Office, NHS Research Scotland, INVOLVE, NIHR Central Commissioning Facility and members of the public.

The Standards were developed following on from the work done developing the INVOLVE Values and Principles Framework of 2015 and shared with stakeholders and wider community for consideration and piloted with over 40 groups. In April 2019 the improved UK Standards for Public Involvement were launched.

Further information about developing and testing the standards can be found on the UK Standards for Public Involvement website