Project 810 | Celebrating new roles for peer researchers in health research

A celebration of our achievements during our participatory project ‘Public perceptions of the future of primary care’, disseminating our findings on the challenges and impacts of peer co-research.
We are working with a group of experienced public contributors as peer-researchers, which involves being more actively involved in planning and conducting research, rather than acting solely in advisory roles. Our research project explores two key questions:
1) What do the public understand by “Neighbourhood Health Service” and “family doctor”?
2) How can public contributors in established involvement roles effectively engage as peer co-researchers to reach more diverse communities, and what are the benefits and challenges of this approach?
Together, we have co-designed a survey exploring public perceptions of the future of general practice and understanding of the terms “Neighbourhood Health Service”, and “family doctor”. Peer researchers have facilitated the survey with members of the voluntary, community, faith, and social enterprise (VCFSE) groups they attend. This offers them a more active research role, while potentially reaching diverse survey participants, thus improving survey reach and representation. We have developed some rich and varied insights and learning points from this innovative project. We are keen to share our key learning through a half-day celebration event attended by members of other PPI groups, researchers, and other interested individuals and groups.

Approach:
We will host an in-person event at which we will engage with other public contributors, PPI managers, and researchers in discussion about diversifying public contributor roles. We will celebrate and share the story of our project, explaining the ethical and bureaucratic challenges we encountered as we prepared to conduct the survey, sharing advice on how to approach innovative research projects in ways that meet the standards for ethical approval, ensuring peer researchers are well informed on issues such as GDPR, confidentiality, and avoiding coercion when approaching and recruiting potential survey participants. We will also share findings from the survey, indicating patients’ perceptions and expectations on the future of primary care, and we will explore the gap between these perceptions/expectations, and NHS messaging and rhetoric about the future direction of primary care.
We are producing guidance for other PPIE groups who want to extend their roles and we will launch this at the celebration event. We will also share this within the university, with the SPCR PPI leads (and make it available on their website), and our extensive extended networks, including NIHR PSRCs network (SafetyNet), the ARC Public Involvement Community, and NHSE REN network.
The event will be held on a day in May 2026, according to room availability, to give sufficient time for planning and promoting the event, and for evaluation of the event.

Please briefly detail who you plan to involve and/or engage as part of your activity and the rationale for focusing on this group. We plan to involve other experienced public contributors looking to broaden their roles; the public who are; interested in taking on public contributor roles and learning more regarding what they can do with them; PPI Managers interested in supporting peer research and understanding how to broaden these roles through co production; researchers interested in doing peer research that is part of a collaborative process with peers; university support staff such as those involved in ethics committees, contracts, and data protection who want to understand the process of co-production; VCFSE sector organisations interested in surveying the public on their views and doing so in inclusive ways, and policy makers interested in public surveys that reflect diverse communities
and individuals.
We will invite our 12 peer researchers who are diverse in age, gender, and ethnicity to attend and participate, they are engaged in varied roles as public contributors, and have worked on many research projects. The peer researchers will co-design and lead the event. Their combined enthusiasm for this innovative project and their direct experience of hands-on research situates them as champions for explaining the benefits and challenges of embedding new roles for public contributors. Working with peer researchers, we have seen how this role enables reach into a breadth of networks, reaching potential participants who infrequently have opportunities to share their views in surveys. Hence, our work, and the group’s enthusiasm for this approach can be shared with others, inspiring them to try similar methods of involvement.
We will share invitations to the event through PPI leads, the peer researchers’ networks, which include marginalised/isolated communities, a mental health support group, and a dementia group, plus other PPI networks, and research staff links into local community, and charity groups. We will also invite policy makers from policy@manchester and researchers through our research networks