Building Research Partnerships (BRP) training is a partnership with Health and Social Care Research & Development Division and the Northern Ireland Cancer Trials Network, who have been providing training for over 10 years to give people an opportunity to learn more about Personal and Public Involvement (PPI) in research. PPI means involving people in all aspects of the research process as partners.
BRP training is open to members of the public who are involved in health research or are interested in being involved in health research including patients, carers and service users. Also, BRP training supports researchers who want to learn more about PPI, on how to implement PPI and how to build more effective PPI relationships throughout the research cycle.
Training involves a full-day, in-person workshop or a shorter virtual session.
All attendees are asked to watch pre-recorded presentations, showing an introduction to PPI in research. So far, over 450 participants have benefitted from this training, including researchers, health and social care professionals, patients, carers and the public.
Northern Ireland Chest Heart and Stroke (NICHS) charity was one of the organisations participating in the most recent BRP training. The charity deliver vital care and prevention services, supporting ground breaking research and campaigning for change for anyone living with chest heart and stroke conditions.
Amy Coey, Service Improvement Lead at NICHS attended BRP training for the first time. As part of her role, Amy started a ‘Care Services Advisory Group’ within NICHS – a group of people with lived experience of chest, heart and stroke conditions as well as their carers’, living in Northern Ireland.
Confirming the importance of PPI, the training helped Amy learn more about the research cycle, research priorities and the importance of listening to service users.
“Building Research Partnerships training emphasised the value of the lived experience of service users. From this, I’ve learned to ensure open-ended communication and to ask for feedback on peoples’ experience of the meetings, with my advisory group.
“This training has increased my knowledge of research priorities and ensures I am following good practice. If I didn’t attend BRP training, I wouldn’t have improved what I can offer to my advisory group, in terms of obtaining feedback.”
“This has increased my awareness to engage and involve service users in as many of our services as possible.”
For more information on upcoming BRP training, please visit:
https://research.hscni.net/building-research-partnerships-ni-training-new-training-dates