Community Engaged Scholars Programme

The Community Engaged Scholars Programme (CES-P) is an education and training initiative funded by the Health Research Board and facilitated by the PPI Ignite Network @ University of Galway. This programme was first piloted in 2019 and is beginning it's second round in 2024. The CES programme provides formal training and pilot study seed funds for partnerships comprised of a Community Partner and an Academic Partner interested in embedding PPI in their collaborative research. The CES-P increases the capacity of community-academic partnership to conduct research to improve the health of our communities.

The overall objectives is to build partnerships between three research teams and three community organizations, to faciliate ongoing research. The partnerships will complete a small research study, adopting PPI approaches across all phases and drawing on that data and experience, work together to submit a grant application for new funding (from national or international funders), to conduct further, related research

For more information regarding this project, click here.

Our Aim

The aim of the Community Engaged Scholars Programme (CES-P) is to support the development of partnerships between researchers and community organisations interested in conducting research together that aims to improve the health of their community and that is driven by public and patient involvement (PPI) principles.

Outputs

An evaluation of the pilot CES-P programme was completed. This included a process and an impact evaluation. It adopted a mixed-methods approach, including a documentary review, interviews with staff at PPI Ignite @ University of Galway, focus groups with members of the community-academic partnerships participating in the programme, and analysis of evaluation forms completed by community and academic partners. The evaluation is available online to read here: CESP Evaluation

Impacts

The CES-P evaluation identified many beneficial impacts on researchers, communityy partners, the relationship between partners, community organisations, the university and the research process. As a result of CES-P one new community-academic partnership was formed. For two existing community-academic partnerships, CES-P (NUI Galway) provided the community and academic partners with an opportunity to work together collaboratively on a research project underpinned by PPI for the first time. An impact of CES-P was that community and academic partners began to think differently and more positively about community-academic partnerships, and attitudes among community partners towards working in partnership with academic partners improved.