Consumer and community involvement: implementation research for impact (CCIRI) - implementing evidence-based patient and public involvement across health and medical research in Australia - a mixed methods protocol.

Abstract

Background: Within Australia, there is increasing recognition of the importance and value of patient and public involvement, or consumer and community involvement (CCI), in health and medical research and healthcare improvement. Despite this and policy mandates, there has been little behavioural and systems change to embed and support CCI. Often, this is relegated to tokenistic gestures rather than authentic partnerships. The aim of this national project is to use evidence-generated knowledge co-led by consumers, community members, researchers and clinicians to embed CCI in health and medical research and healthcare improvement.

Methods: The Consolidated Framework for Implementation Research and the Learning Health System framework underpin the project to facilitate an iterative process to change systems and individual behaviour towards adoption of CCI in health and medical research and healthcare improvement. Key stakeholder groups include research translation centres, funding bodies, clinicians, professional staff involved in healthcare improvement, researchers and consumers and community members. To understand the attitudes, knowledge, beliefs, behaviours, system barriers and facilitators around CCI in health and medical research and healthcare improvement, semi-structured interviews and surveys will be conducted across key stakeholder groups. Template analysis and descriptive statistics will be used to report data from the national survey respectively prior to triangulation of data. Findings will be reported through traditional scientific outputs such as conference presentations and peer-reviewed publications. Other anticipated outputs include policy briefs, organizational implementation toolkits and resources and a co-designed digital knowledge hub to support individuals with implementation and scale up across stakeholders.

Discussion: This study will build on considerable stakeholder engagement and prior priority-setting and includes broad and detailed consideration of perspectives from diverse stakeholders at a national level. Robust methodological frameworks, co-design and partnership with stakeholders will be used to inform resources to support systems change to facilitate CCI in health and medical research and healthcare improvement. Ethics approval was obtained from Monash Health (RES-23-0000-275Q).