Patient Involvement
Patient and public involvement: a methodological overview
Overview
For as long as there have been commissioners, there have been commissioners who try to involve communities in the commissioning process. These pioneers have blazed a trail for the rest of us, marking out the easier roads as well as the hazards.
How does public involvement bring value to commissioning?
It is worth taking a minute to consider what kind of value PPI can bring and how if only because your needs as commissioners will determine the kind of engagement you undertake. When it works well, public involvement in commissioning
- Allows you to meet local needs in a way that local people recognise and value
- Clarifies priorities and helps stakeholders understand the difficult decisions commissioners face
- Helps develop the kind of services people want to engage with, a crucial step in extending self care
- Can identify service improvements that are cost neutral or even cash releasing
What kinds of methods work best?
The tool you choose will depend on the job you need to do and there are very many tools out there - too many to list on this page - but we offer some links to useful sites and documents.
Some forms of involvement are geared to helping develop concepts and design services. If they were evaluations we might call them ‘formative’. Typically conducted at the development stage they may involve a series of engagements with the same set of stakeholders to make sure we have understood their input well and acted upon it appropriately.
‘Summative’ consultation is more useful when it comes to assessing the value of services to service users. They often require a broader engagement and can be a source of useful performance data.
A similar continuum exists for the kinds of data that commissioners can gather. Most of us are familiar with ‘quantitative’ data, surveys at the like. In short, quantitative data is the stuff you can add up and put in a spreadsheet. ‘Qualitative’ is much harder to count and valuable in a different way. Focus Groups, case studies and depth interviews, all ‘qualitative’ give colour and impact and illuminate the ‘how’ rather than the ‘how much’.
The right tool for the job
It would be wrong to be prescriptive about what methods work for which tasks. Naturally, different commissioners in different contexts will experience very different results. The table below shows some combinations of tools and tasks which have proved useful in the past. A more detailed table can be found by following this link.
|
Tool/Task |
Planning |
Purchasing |
Contracting |
Monitoring & Evaluation |
|
Focus Groups |
x |
|
|
x |
|
Citizen's Juries |
x |
|
|
|
|
Advisory Panels/ Lay advisors |
x |
x |
x |
x |
|
Surveys |
x |
|
|
x |
Recommended Reading
Engaging with communities for PBC - This presentation outlines some of the benefits of engaging local people with practice-based commissioning. It gives a clear indication of what PPI can bring to practice based commissioning. read more »
Supporting PCTs in engaging with their c... - Dr Brian Fisher's document for the Department of Health outlines how PCTs can be better engaging with their communities and outlines the benefits of doing so. read more »
Effective practice-based commissioning: ... - This guidance, produced by the NHS Alliance, the National Association for Patient Participation and Developing Patient Partnerships, presents research into the views of the public, health professionals and primary care trusts about the issue of patient involvement. It outlines the benefits of Pat... read more »
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