Building Connections workshop series

Building Connections workshop series

Dates: Workshops series in Autumn 2023 and a main event, An Meitheal, 21 October 2023
Venues: Venues at 3 community organisations (Dublin & Galway), An Meitheal at community venue, Dublin

Why?

Research is often done on communities rather than with communities. The PPI Ignite Network delivers PPI (public and patient involvement) training and support to enable researchers to conduct research with communities. Over 80% of this training and support is delivered to researchers and students within Universities. The Network's Equality Diversity and Inclusion Strategy and members of the Network's Public Advisory Board (PAB) both emphasise the urgent need to build PPI capacity among the public and in particular, in marginalized communities. To enable them to develop meaningful partnerships with researchers. In this proposal, the term "community" includes both communitybased organisations (eg a family resource centre) and patient charities.

How?

We (the PPI Ignite Network national office and members of the Network's Public Advisory Board) will work with three communities and three postgraduate researchers to develop the capacities and skills required to build a relationship and to co-create research questions of interest to all involved, by:

Co-designing a customizable series of 3 workshops, Building Connections, and facilitating these workshops with each community-researcher partnership, to build a partnership and to identify and prioritize a research question of interest to the partnership, which will then be the focus of the postgraduate research study.
Bringing together the three community/researcher partnerships into one central event, An Meitheal, to share their experiences and learnings with each other and with other PPI contributors and postgraduate researchers.
Evaluating the Building Connections programme and sharing the evaluation summary and workshop templates, utilising the PPI Ignite Network's online Resource hub and other Network connections and communication channels.

Award Date: 05 April 2023
Award Value: €5,000
Principal Investigator: Ms Edel Murphy
Host Institution: University of Galway
Scheme: Conference and Event Sponsorship Scheme