Public perceptions of the future of Primary Care: Enhancing the role of public contributors as participatory peer co-researchers through a peer-facilitated survey.

PI Title: Jessica Drinkwater

Lead Member: Manchester

Background
The government want to improve the NHS by moving to a “Neighbourhood Health Service” and bringing back the “family doctor”. They suggest this will support people to stay healthy, avoid illness, and live well as they get older. But many people understand these terms in different ways. For example, some think “family doctor” means seeing the same doctor every time, while others feel it’s more about having a doctor who listens well and communicates clearly. It’s important to understand what the public thinks about these ideas, especially people who are often left out like those from ethnic minority groups, people with disabilities, or those living on low incomes. This is important to make sure any changes to the NHS match what the public expect and need.

Aims
We have two aims for this project:
• To survey the public and find out what they think about the plans for the future of primary care.
• To design and test a new way of doing surveys with the public, focused on including people that are often left out.

How we will do this
At The University of Manchester, we have a number of groups of public contributors who already work with us on research. These public contributors are people with diverse backgrounds and interests who bring their real-life experiences to research projects. They help us make sure our work is useful and reflects what matters to the public.
For this project, we want to work with these public contributors in a new way. They will take on the role of peer co-researchers. A peer co-researcher is a person from the public who works as part of the team doing the research.
Together with the peer co-researchers we will design a survey asking what the public think of the future of primary care, including the terms “Neighbourhood Health Service” and “family doctor”. The peer co-researchers will then do the survey with community groups they already work with. This will help us reach people who are often not included in research. We will then analyse the results of the survey to understand what people said. Finally, we will reflect on the benefits and challenges of the peer co-researcher role.

Benefits of the research
We will share the results of the survey with local and national policy makers by writing papers, blogs, and holding webinars. This will help to make sure NHS changes meet the needs of all communities.
If the new peer co-researcher role is a success we will use it in future research. We will also write guidance on how public contributors can work as peer co-researchers. We will share this with our networks of researchers and public contributors.