Last year, the PSTRC asked members of the public, patients, carers and healthcare professionals ‘What are your questions about primary care patient safety?’ This process was called a James Lind Alliance (JLA) Priority Setting Partnership (PSP). The aim of the JLA is to work with patients, carers and healthcare professionals to identify the questions they believe are a priority for research to address. For our PSP the top 10 priorities included questions focused on the most vulnerable in society, holistic whole-person care, safer communication and co-ordination between care providers, work intensity, continuity of care, suicide risk, complex care at home, and confidentiality. This was the first national prioritisation of future research for primary care patient safety and helped shaped our new PSTRC focus.
There have now been over 50 JLA partnerships which have asked people to identify future research questions about a range of different healthcare areas from schizophrenia to endometrial cancer. In November 2017, the JLA hosted a meeting to reflect on the partnerships, identify key issues and to share learning. People shared their experiences to help shape the future of the JLA process and to reflect back on the process to identify the parts that worked well and where there might be room for improvement. Key to all the partnerships is that they have all prominently championed the voices of patients, carers and healthcare professionals to help prioritise research questions that are of importance. The JLA is overseen by the NIHR to support the research priorities identified through the partnerships so that they can feed directly into national funding priorities.
GM PSTRC 