If you haven’t read Elspeth Mathie (@elspeth_mathie) and colleagues’ excellent paper ‘Reciprocal relationships and the importance of feedback in patient and public involvement: A mixed methods study’  in Health Expectations then I highly recommend a read over the next few days.  

Their small but significant study  – which was funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) Collaboration for Leadership in Applied Health Research and Care (CLAHRC) in the East of England – is based on a survey of, and interviews with, public contributors and researchers. It shines a spotlight on the whole issue of feedback; the lack of which has been a source of some irritation for the public involvement community for many years.

For me the most striking thing about the paper is not so much its headline figures reporting that, while receiving feedback is important to the vast majority of contributors (82%), 19% had received none at all. Shameful though this is.  Or the fact that when feedback does happen it can take many different forms. Equally we should not be surprised that there are many different ways of giving feedback and a number of factors that can get in its war – from time, to changes in personnel to mention just two.

No, for me, the interesting thing to emerge from the interviews conducted in the study is that while some researchers saw feedback as a matter of courtesy (true), public contributors viewed it as an opportunity to learn and improve. Implicit in this is a sense that perhaps some researchers still feel they ‘have to’ do ‘PPI’ rather than see it as a valuable part of their work.  Perhaps the good news is that the experience of giving and receiving feedback seems to improve as researchers and contributors got older and wiser.

Perhaps the other key message that I have taken away with me is a reminder of the need to think about feedback at the start, rather than at the end, of a research project. For by the end it is all too late.  People are exhausted and want to move on. Deciding with public contributors at the very beginning of the project what you want to feed back, why and how you are going to use the information gained is extremely important.

As highlighted in the rather brilliant new ‘Guidance for Researcher: Feedback’ published by Elspeth Mathie and the team at the Centre for Research in Public Health and Community Care with the support of the East of England NIHR Research Design Services (RDS) organisation which I also highly recommend.

One final note. A commitment to give feedback and learn from it is a sign of a healthy team culture. As with many other things to do with team culture the tone and style is set at the top. Feedback is therefore one of those things that we should hold Chief Investigators and Principal Investigators accountable for.

Have a great weekend.

Oh, and feedback on the blog is always welcome. Thanks.