Building stronger public involvement

Healthwise Wales is built on a foundation of strong patient and public involvement, allowing us to ensure that our research offers accessible involvement opportunities for all.

To ensure we remain compliant with the new national standards for public involvement, we recently held an audit to assess our success to date, and to make recommendations to ensure compliance in the future.

We addressed how accessible the involvement opportunities with Healthwise Wales are for the public and how well we reach different groups of people. We also looked at how we work with the public to ensure that all of their contributions are valued and that the relationships we are creating are productive and mutually-beneficial.

We also identified how we promote support and learning to build confidence in the research and use plain language and two-way communication with the public to promote greater understanding and accessibility. Finally, the audit looked at how we share the difference that public involvement makes to our research and the ways that we are promoting and protecting the public interest.

There are areas that can be improved further and we identified that our agreed purpose for public involvement and outcomes needed to be better documented and that improved tools are required for assessing the impact of public involvement in our research. Any required support when public research partners start working with the research team also need to be more clearly identified and reviewed annually.

We are already addressing these areas and putting new actions in place to help ensure even more successful public involvement with Healthwise Wales research in the future. Audits like this will continue on a regular basis to ensure on-going compliance.