Ensuring meaningful patient and public involvement and engagement is at the heart of ACHA

Author
Molly Hunt

Posted on
14 August 2024

Read time
3 minutes

The diverse views and needs of our local communities guide all of ACHA’s work, shaping our research, education programmes, and how we support the transformation of health and care services.

ACHA’s Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) strategy has been developed to support the active involvement of patients and the public in the design and mobilisation of our brand-new research centre.

The ACHA team have been working hard to establish our PPIE function and engage with local communities from the outset to embed inclusive PPIE practices into all ACHA’s activities.

How we co-designed our first PhD programme with the local community:

ACHA secured match-funding from the Dunhill Medical Trust to launch our first PhD Programme, “New approaches to FrAilty: Inclusivity and REsilience in Ageing Research” (FAIRER), due to begin in January 2025.

This programme will focus on applied health research, addressing the needs of our local population and health and care systems with practical solutions. A Steering Group will oversee the programme, ensuring it aligns with ACHA’s core themes: frailty prevention, rehabilitation, and cognition.

Step One: Engaging Our Network

To ensure our work reflects the needs of our local communities, ACHA engaged with key organisations in Waltham Forest, Redbridge, and West Essex. Through workshops and surveys, we identified healthy ageing priorities and effective public engagement methods, drawing on the expertise of local partners like Healthwatch, Age UK, and various community groups.

Step Two: Working with the Community Advisory Group (CAG)

Our CAG plays a crucial role in guiding ACHA’s work, providing community-based advice to ensure that our research and education initiatives respect the cultural and ethnic diversity of participants. The CAG helped refine our engagement methods and co-designed inclusive materials, such as the survey questions, ensuring our research addresses the needs of all community members.

Step Three: Engaging with Patients and the Public

We actively reached out to patients and the public through local health and wellbeing events, gathering insights into the issues they face as they age. Using the survey co-produced with the CAG, we identified key themes related to frailty, cognition, and rehabilitation, and categorised feedback based on these themes, indicating which priorities were most frequently mentioned.

Step Four: Developing PhD Topics from Our Findings

The insights gathered were shared with academics and the ACHA Board, leading to the development of PhD research topics that closely align with the priorities of our community. These topics include areas such as cognitive wellbeing, inequalities in delirium identification, and rehabilitation for carers of older adults.

Research Topics shortlisted:

  1. Behaviour change to improve cognitive wellbeing in older people from underserved groups with mild cognitive impairment.
  2. Understanding inequalities in delirium identification to improve care and patient outcomes.
  3. Designing an inequalities focussed digital health intervention for healthy ageing.
  4. Development of a rehabilitation intervention to reduce concerns about falls among carers of older adults with cognitive impairment and fracture.
  5. The influence of multigenerational housing on healthcare use for persons living with dementia.
  6. Monitoring of fracture repair in older people to optimise recovery.

Conclusion

Through early and extensive engagement efforts, ACHA has started to build its PPIE function within the local community, laying the groundwork to understand and address the healthy ageing priorities of our diverse population.

We will continually learn from our engagements, refining our approaches to ensure they are effective and inclusive. By prioritising the feedback and needs of our community, ACHA remains dedicated to driving impactful and equitable health and care service improvements.

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