All health care research must involve service users in the research design and research process.
The College of Radiographers expects that all research carried out by SoR members will include people in partnership - patient and public, alongside practitioners - from research proposal stage onwards, including approaches to dissemination strategies.
The College of Radiographers Industry Partnership Scheme (CoRIPS) panel look for evidence of patient and public involvement when assessing applications for funding. More widely, research funding bodies for health will also be looking for this approach when they assess a research bid or research proposal.
Patient Public and Practitioner Partnerships within Imaging and Radiotherapy: Guiding Principles (SCoR, 2018), section 4, provides some guiding principles about ‘Person-Centred Radiography Research’.
The document underlines the ethos that the voices and opinions of service users should be integral to all radiography research. Patients and the public can bring value to research in many ways. In the majority of cases, people can be empowered to work in partnership with researchers rather than simply being regarded as research participants; co-production can be beneficial to all who are involved.
SCoR and the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) provide several resources to help researchers to work alongside service users in their research proposals and bids. For further information, please see the following documents: