Background: Incorporating patient and public involvement (PPI) in research is crucial for ensuring the relevance and success of studies, yet it remains significantly underutilised in surgical research.
Main body: This commentary presents insights from our neurosurgical research team's experience with establishing and working with a PPI group called "Science for Tomorrow's Neurosurgery" on research regarding novel intra-operative optical imaging techniques. Through collaboration with patient-focused charities, we have successfully incorporated patient perspectives into our work at each stage of the research pipeline, whilst adhering to core PPI principles, such as reciprocal relationships, co-learning, partnerships, and transparency.
Conclusion: We highlight the specific value added to our work in terms of participant recruitment, research ethics and results dissemination.
Keywords: Neurosurgery; PPI; Patient involvement; Public engagement.
Including patients and members of the public in medical research is really important. It helps make sure the research is useful and successful. Surprisingly, it’s not used enough in surgical research. This article talks about how our team of brain surgeons and scientists worked with a group called “Science for Tomorrow’s Neurosurgery” to include brain surgery patients in our research about new ways to look at the brain during surgery. We worked closely with charities that focus on helping patients with brain conditions, and we made sure to listen to what patients had to say every step of the way, from planning our research to sharing our results. We followed some important rules, like making sure everyone involved felt like they were being treated fairly, learning together, working together with different groups, and being honest and open. We found that having patients involved in the design and development really helped us find the right people to take part in our research, make sure we were doing things the right way, and share our findings in a way that made sense to everyone.
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