Nothing about us, without us: is for us

Abstract

Plain English summary Born in Bradford (BiB) is following the lives of more than 36,000 individuals to see why some families are healthier and others are not so. The children in the original study are aged range between 10 and 15 years, all born at the Bradford Royal Infirmary. Parents consented to take part in the study part prior to the birth of the child/ren (some families have more than one child in the study). BiB has been working successfully with grassroots communities for several years to increase community involvement in the research programme using various methods ranging from community engagement to coproduction. “There has always been a balance, even earlier stages of the study when the focus was medical—it had to be plain (for the community). Everything we thought about did have an impact on BiB.” The recruitment and establishment of proactive lay research groups is necessary to aid and shape our research. We believe that researchers need to ensure that they encourage community participation from all the various communities that make up the local population. Our approach serves a dual purpose as we want our communities to contribute to our research but at the same time, we want to offer local people skills development and confidence building so that they can articulate their views at various networks and events. We wrote this paper to highlight some challenges, good practices and methods we have achieved to work with local communities.

Keywords

• Public
• Participation
• Involvement
• Engagement
• Lay participation
• 4MAT models and co-production