PPI: Patient and Public Involvement
At JUICE we are passionate about working with young people who have experience of mental health difficulties and who are using (or have used) mental health services. We believe the key to making a real difference in the world of young people’s mental health, is by working with young people to design, develop and implement research that is important to them and works for them.
Patient and public involvement in research known as PPI is important, and our teamwork in line with the ‘UK Standards for Public Involvement in Research’ which aim to have ‘Better public involvement for better health and social care research’.
However, we are also known for thinking creatively, using innovative and fun ways to work with young people and staff, get their feedback and have them as a central part of our team. We like to be a bit different!
We have a weekly PPI/consultation group with young people who are current inpatients on a mental health ward. This forms our core PPI group who are consulted about all our upcoming research ideas, interests, and funding applications. This is a dynamic group of young people, with different young people attending and contributing week by week, depending on who is around on the ward and who wants to join us!
Young people in this group can bring key issues, barriers, experiences, and good practice to these meetings with our researchers, and these topics often form the basis of our research planning.
Our Research Team can consult this group of young people for advice on our current projects. This can include thinking about the research aims, feedback on assessments or materials such as leaflets or letters, input to our data analysis and interpreting our findings, and help with sharing our research findings to our key audiences- young people, families and staff working with young people.
Our mission is to undertake outstanding and innovative mental health research for young people. With young people at the heart of everything we do, our research will improve access to evidence based treatments and support which makes a difference in the real world.
We also have additional PPI groups for specific projects, such as the Bipolar At-Risk Trial (BART II) and the MOTIV8 trial where individuals with relevant lived experience are consulted about a particular active project.
We have also developed a new PPI group to help tackle the critical issues of making research more inclusive. This group is made up of a diverse group of people from UK ethnic minority backgrounds. This PPI group is bringing their ideas of how we can develop better processes to ensure recruitment into our research is more inclusive.
This will include animations, key information, and outreach work. We are excited to see what this new group will develop in their work with us.
Our favourite piece of PPI involvement so far is our fantastic ‘JUICE’ title and logo- designed by young people on Junction 17.
