Lived Experience Panel

As part of our collaborative and community-focused approach, Common Health Assets has embedded a Lived Experience Panel at the heart of the research project to ensure that the research is informed by ongoing community expertise, voice, and perspective.

 

As a project which focuses on how communities can build and mobilise their assets to improve health and wellbeing, engaging and working with people in the communities that the research is taking place in is crucial to improve our understanding of the real-world contexts that impact how community organisations deliver their activities, support community members, and improve the health and wellbeing of the individuals who engage with them.

 

This Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) aspect of the project is being led by the Glasgow Centre for Population Health.

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The Panel is composed of about 12 participants, from the study areas across the UK, who are beneficiaries of the community-led organisations that the project is partnered with. Members have met at key stages of the project, roughly every 6 months, to help shape the research and study design as it develops, and to participate in activities relevant to the project phases and methods. They also had a role providing guidance to the research team and in informing the interpretation of findings, as they emerge, to ensure they are relevant and meaningful to community organisations. Members of the Panel were also members of the Study Steering Committee to ensure that the value and importance of community voice is integrated across the research project.

 

Panel meetings

Six Panel meetings have taken place from July 2022 to October 2024. These were held online (July 2022) and in-person in Glasgow (November 2022), London (May 2023), Belfast (October 2023), Bournemouth (March 2024) and Glasgow (October 2024). We held in-person meetings at our project partnered CLOs to provide

an opportunity for participants to learn from and build relationships with others across the UK.

 

​​​​Within Panel meetings, opportunities to develop participants knowledge of community-based research and to develop a variety of interpersonal and community development skills were provided through a range of training opportunities. 

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Dinner was held the night before meetings to enable Panel members to spend time together socially and time was built into the programme to allow Panel members to explore the meeting locations, with trips to places of interest organised in a number of sites. All barriers were addressed to enable full participation and Panel members received vouchers, in line with NIHR guidance, for their participation and expertise. In between full meetings communication was maintained with informal catch ups held online, and a WhatsApp group.​

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Throughout our six Panel meetings, Panel members have had a role in developing and refining the project's Programme Theories, refining the participant interview topic guide, developing statements for, and participating in, the Q methodology component of the project and assisting with data interpretation from the longitudinal questionnaire study and Q study.