Public involvement

The Coventry Health Determinants Research Collaboration (HDRC) has a vision to create a research environment that is open, creative, and dynamic. The HDRC will help Coventry City Council become more research-active and evidence-based in its decision making about how resources are used to tackle health determinants.

What is Public Involvement? 

Public involvement will ensure that research is done ‘with’ or ‘by’ people in Coventry, and not ‘to’, ‘for’, or ‘about’ them. Public involvement in the HDRC will help ensure that the public rightly have a voice in a collaboration that may affect them. Involvement will also help research to be meaningful, relevant, and impactful, and should provide positive experiences and outcomes for the public involved. This means we need to involve people in Coventry as part of the research team, together with our collaborators. Through our work, we also plan to contribute to the international evidence-base that informs practice in public involvement.

Why is Public Involvement in the Coventry HDRC important? 

The HDRC is committed to involving the public so that our research can best impact on health determinants in Coventry. Enabling and achieving good public involvement means we can better serve our community, as the public have a right to be involved in research that could affect them. Public involvement will help our work to be more meaningful, ethical, and relevant, and means we can better learn from the skills, expertise and ideas held among the public.

Public Involvement Standards in the HDRC 

The work of the Coventry HDRC will be guided by six UK standards for public involvement:

Inclusive opportunities

1. Working together
2. Support and learning
3. Governance
4. Two-way communication
5. Impact and evidence

You can read the Coventry HDRC Public Involvement Principles here.