About

Trinity PPI Ignite Office promotes, develops and celebrates the involvement of patients, carers and members of the interested public in various aspects of Trinity health-related research. It is a member of the National PPI Network, whose aim is to support and further build capacity for high-quality PPI in health research throughout Ireland through a Network that serves its members and benefits the wider community.

Trinity PPI Ingite is supported via a joint funding scheme between the Health Research Board and Irish Research Council along with co-funding and support from the Office of the Dean of Research, the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Health Sciences, the School of Nursing and Midwifery and the Trinity Centre for Ageing and Intellectual Disability.

What is Public, Patient Involvement in Research?

The Health Research Board (HRB) website defines Patient and Public Involvement as follows:

By ‘public’ we mean everyone in Ireland who has an interest in health and social care as a public service including potential users of services. By ‘patient’ we mean people who use services such as patients, service users, clients or their carers.

By ‘involvement’ we mean the active involvement between people who use services, carers, the general public and researchers. 

The HRB also clarifies what it is not:

It does not include the use of people as participants in research (or as research ‘subjects’) and does not provide data for individual research projects.

The HRB provides the following examples of public and patient involvement:

• Identifying & Prioritising stage
• Service users, carers and members of the public can help inform research priorities
• Design stage
• Help clarify the research question
• Co-design project
• Ensure the methodology is suitable
• Assist with a recruitment strategy
• Undertaking/Management stage
• Assist in collecting data & carrying out interviews
• Representation on project steering & governance groups
• Analysing & Interpreting stage
• Work with the research team to interpret data & develop themes
• Dissemination stage
• Share knowledge on where best to share the findings
• Present the findings
• Help write up dissemination materials
• Implementation stage
• Build relationships with knowledge users & policy makers through local user groups
• Assist in rolling out training plans