Vicky Ward

The Embedded Research Project has been going for a while now and the case studies have been identified and data collection is in full swing. Over at the Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) desk my colleagues and I have been grappling with the Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) issue, which in reality does not appear to be a day to day issue for the vast majority of those researchers working in, on, or around embedded projects.

Continue reading “Improving patient and public involvement in healthcare” →

The third stage (or work package) for the Embedded study involves undertaking in-depth qualitative research with four embedded initiatives to understand how these initiatives develop, to explore how relationships mature over time, to evidence the strategies that embedded researchers use, and to develop rich case studies of how they support the co-production of health research.

Over the next year, we will be visiting initiatives across the UK with differing project characteristics (including funding and affiliations) and speaking with embedded researchers and their colleagues to understand their backgrounds, motivations and evolving experiences of embedded researchers. ​

Continue reading “Pragmatic data collection: the challenges” →

It’s all getting a bit complicated….

They say the more you know, the more uncertain you become, and I’m becoming very uncertain about how to set up an embedded research programme.

A few years ago it was all so easy. I found an NHS partner who wanted a pragmatic evaluation, a researcher who wanted to make a difference, and a bit of money. I then put them all together and if everything clicked then stuff happened. And that stuff was exciting enough for a few of us to want to write about it in scientific journals.

Continue reading “Lessons from the Embedded project” →

I recently took part in the Embedded Research co-design workshop that aimed at drawing on people’s experiences of planning, managing, delivering embedded researcher initiatives.

It brought together people from across the UK with experience of a range of embedded researcher initiatives. The key question we were asked to keep hold of throughout the workshop was: “What do you wish you had known at the start of your embedded researcher work?”

Here, I’ll reflect on how I would now answer that question following on from the workshop.

Continue reading “Reframing what an embedded researcher model looks like” →

During the recent webinar on an embedded researcher network, I listened to the speakers’ experiences of embedded research with a mixture of anticipation and curiosity. Aware of the NIHR funded study that Vicky Ward is involved in, I was eager to hear details of what had emerged in the scoping review.

It was interesting to hear the criteria used to define embedded research: trained researchers, creating knowledge in a health setting for the benefit of the host and spending part of the working week in a health service. Continue reading “The value of an embedded researcher network” →

I am rarely enticed by social movements that take place in a virtual space. I never succumbed to the Ice Bucket Challenge, I have yet to use #metoo (or any hashtags for that matter) and the title has to be absolutely irresistible to get me to click on a TED video link.

​I simply don’t get excited by the virtual in the same way that I do by the physical. However much I support and agree with these movements, I simply never find myself swept into them online as I do on the streets. Continue reading “Virtual reality of embedded research” →