November Patient, Public Involvement (PPI) with Medical Devices

Cillian Murphy, the actor, refers to Ionbhá or empathy, in the book of that title as a connection - the opportunity for learning from meeting, listening and chatting with others.

In many ways, making connections was precisely the purpose of a workshop held at CÚRAM which took place during the National PPI Festival in Oct 2022.

Professor Abhay Pandit, Director at CÚRAM welcomed the 40 attendees by reminding us that the patient is the ultimate beneficiary of our work even when the device is intended to be operated by as health professional.

The workshop was facilitated by Claire Riordan, Education and Public Engagement Manager at CÚRAM and Martha Killilea from the PPI Ignite Network @ University of Galway. They were accompanied by Derek C Stewart, a patient advocate and Honorary Professor at University of Galway who led the workshop. David Keane, a postdoctoral researcher at CÚRAM spoke at the meeting about how he had actively involved patients in the Bistro study (https://devicesfordignity.org.uk/portfolio-item/bioimpedance-spectroscopy-to-maintain-renal-output-the-bistro-trial/).

A separate session was held for CÚRAM Funded-Investigators which was delivered by Edel Murphy, National Programme Manager for the PPI Ignite Network. Both workshops explored the value of such involvement along with many of the practical aspects of actively involving the public in our work. It marks the first formal PPI training held for CÚRAM researchers. 

The first year lifETIME CDT scholars attended a PPI session that focused on introducing public and patient (PPI) involvement in research and developing basic PPI knowledge and skills for the cohort. Sarah Gundy and Martha Killilea delivered this session to an engaged group of early stage PhD students, eager to embed PPI principles and practices within their projects.

CÚRAM is committed to building capacity across its research community in the area of public and patient involvement (PPI) in research across all disciplines. It aims to build PPI capacity by delivering education and training and providing support to help researchers understand how to plan for and embed the public and patient voice across their research.

Further information:

For those interested in further information about PPI, please visit https://ppinetwork.ie/

An introduction by CÚRAM PI Prof Martin O’Halloran and Prof Aoife Lowery about embedding PPI within the development of Medical Devices in Ireland is available here https://youtu.be/tXZSL20hRAQ

Stewart, D. (2020). Before, beside and beyond [Blog]. Retrieved from https://involveddotblog.wordpress.com/2022/02/23/before-beside-and-beyond-part-1/ A blogpost from Derek Stewart reflecting on involving people in non/pre-clinical, lab-based, biomedical and methodological research