Community Partnerships
Collaborating with our partners across Hampshire and the Isle of Wight
One of the key strands of our strategy is to work in partnership with patients, colleagues and communities. Our Community Partnerships are committed to working alongside organisations who would like to enable their clients, students, residents or services users to research or learn more about it.
The aim of these partnerships is to offer more people the chance to take part in health and care research, promoting the message that health care and research is all around us and not just available when you go to your local hospital. By taking the opportunity to get involved in a research project to local people where they live, work, play or study can make research more accessible and increase the number of people who are able to take part.
Explore our current partnerships:
We work with partners to find research studies that might suit their residents, students and clients. Once a suitable study has been identified we take care of the necessary checks and approvals, and help to coordinate when and how the study will be carried out. Our partnerships give organisations the confidence to promote research that is safe and ethical and is delivered by an experienced research team.
The Care Home Research Partnership (CHRP) is one of our community research partnership streams. We work alongside local care homes in Portsmouth, Southampton, and the surrounding areas, to offer residents the opportunity to take part in research. We are currently expanding this model to include local care agencies that visit patients in their own homes.
Any local care home or agency can be involved if they have an interest in research and evidence-based practice. The Academy team identifies studies that might be of interest to local care homes or agencies, together we review the studies, and assess whether they are doable and whether clients would find them interesting.
If everyone is happy we undertake all of the necessary governance, ethical, and regulatory checks to ensure the research is safe. We then provide experienced staff to come into the home and deliver the study alongside care home/agency staff. Each study is different and may require different amounts of involvement but generally, we are there to help as much as we can.
As part of the partnership we can also offer training to local staff around evidence-based practice and we ensure we feedback the results of studies to care home/agency teams. Teams may also like to be further involved in the research process by contributing to new and forthcoming research ideas. We can help build partnerships with clinical academics or with our university partners.
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We work with a large range of community groups in Portsmouth, Southampton and the surrounding areas, offering people the opportunity to be involved in research.
These are often groups who meet because of a specific medical conditions such as Multiple sclerosis support groups or local meetings of the Alzheimers society or National Ankylosing Spondylitis Society. Our research nurses or physios can attend the group and talk to people about what research projects are happening locally and how they can get involved.
People may also like to get involved in research in other ways such as helping to develop new research ideas, working with some of our university partners and clinical academics to get funding for research or working with the academy team's patient partnership network Side-by-Side.
We are really keen to work with more community groups including those that don't have anything to do with a specific health condition but would like to find out more about taking part or getting involved in health and social care research.
Currently we have a formal research partnership with HIVE Portsmouth with a joint post to increase access to research, including looking into wider health and social issues, and evaluating services to improve their quality.
As part of our Community Research Partnership scheme we have been working with local schools, pre-schools, nurseries and family hubs to widen the opportunities for local people to get involved in research.
We are currently working with primary, Junior and secondary schools across the local area on an study investigating the antibiotic resistance of bacteria commonly carried in our mouths and noses. The research team carries out all of the research activities and the schools promote the study to their parents and children. As part of the collaboration the academic team from the University of Southampton have delivered bespoke lessons around research and microbiology.
A similar study is being carried out in partnership with pre-schools, nurseries and children’s community groups across Portsmouth and Southampton investigating the impact of the meningitis vaccination programme.
As part of the partnership we also offer lessons or teaching sessions about research, or sessions specific to the science behind the study we are working on. The partnerships we build are bespoke and we are happy to tailor them to the needs of each organisation. We are keen to work with any organisations supporting young people to offer them the chance to take part in research. For example, we’ve recruited children to a diabetes screening research study from play groups, leisure centres, parks and community events.
To make research more relevant and accessible for those living in our communities, we are developing a network of peer researcher colleagues across Portsmouth, Southampton and the Isle of Wight.
Peer research is driven and undertaken by people who have lived experience of the issues being studied. Peer researchers have a small amount of research training and then lead small projects on an area of interest to them, sometimes within a core theme. They will then be equal partners in research design, the development of the most appropriate research methods and tools - they often collect the data and analyse it and can use their findings to drive change and improvements.
We also work alongside peer researchers in some of our research and evaluation work - they will carry out interviews and data collection. This allows for much greater insight and also extends inclusion and diversity in research.
We offer training and development on using Participatory Methods and working with peer researchers. Please email us to find out more.