The NIHR Applied Research Collaboration (ARC) North East and North Cumbria (NENC) has developed a new guide aimed at supporting ethical public involvement and community engagement (PICE) in research.
The guidelines will help to support researchers, public contributors, practitioners and anyone interested in health and care research to work towards ethically sound research practice specifically for the Public Patient Involvement/ Engagement (PPI/PPIE) element of the work.
A small working group of public contributors, researchers and Public Involvement and Community Engagement (PICE) leads have developed the guidelines, which aim to encourage a better understanding of ethical issues in relation to PICE amongst the research community.
The guidance highlights some of the key aspects that people might want to consider before undertaking PICE activity, and includes useful links to further reading and information.
The guidance also includes a handy ‘checklist’ that can be used by researchers and others, to make sure that key ethical issues have been considered.
Dr Felicity Shenton, Public Involvement and Community Engagement (PICE) Manager for the ARC North East and North Cumbria, said:
“This guidance document is the end result of a piece of work that started when a member of the ARC Public Advisory Network raised a question around the support and safeguards that might be in place to support public partners and researchers who are working in challenging and sensitive areas of work – such as domestic abuse, childhood trauma and serious mental illness etc.
“A small working group involving public partners, researchers, representatives from the VCSE, practitioners and PICE leads then got together to co-produced this guidance – which offers practical advice about issues that might need to be addressed.”
The guidelines are intended for use by people working in or contributing to health and social care research including public contributors, VCSE organisations as well as researchers.
They do not replace the need for formal ethical approval for a research study, for example through NHS or University ethics processes.