A potentially pioneering new initiative which will enable a collaboration of community groups, academics, NHS, and a community arts organisation to work together and discover the best ways in which creative artistic methods can be used to engage with the north west population has been given the green light.

The award of £125,000 was made after a proposal submitted by a partnership group including Applied Research Collaboration North West Coast (ARC NWC) , ARC Greater Manchester, award-winning Community Interest Company Made by Mortals and the Research Support Service. Sajda Majeed a community activist from East Lancashire is also a member of the project team.

The project titled Participatory Arts in Health and Care Research (PAIR): Building a North-West consortium for developing innovative arts approaches to Public and Person Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) secured the funding from the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR).

It aims to strengthen the relationships between community organisations, those participating in research, researchers, and the final end users of research findings, all through participatory arts.

Participatory arts provide extensive opportunities for service users and patients to share and create experiences and shape research by ‘bringing their experiences to life’ and giving others in their position a voice to be heard.

The project, which began on August 1st 2023, draws on ARC NWC’s expertise of building existing networks and links to the NIHR infrastructure and develop a North West consortium led by the expertise of community and stakeholder engagement.

An evaluation from a series of workshops will be held to explore and promote the develop the participatory arts model further whilst extending its reach and explore ways of evaluating the approach through researchers at ARC NWC, the ARC NWC Community Research and Engagement Network (COREN) , ARC NWC member organisation Lancaster University, community organisation Made by Mortals, and the host Trust for the project, Pennine Care NHS Foundation Trust.

Learnings from the project will be used to evaluate how innovative participatory arts can be used in public involvement, to explain and assist an assortment of health and care research studies throughout the North West Coast and beyond.

Project co- lead and Equitable Place-Based Health and Care (EPHC) theme manager, Paula Wheeler outlined ARC NWC’s contribution to the project “The collaboration will lead on North West Coast partnership development, promoting the alignment of the NIHR infrastructure to embed a model of participatory approaches within its existing PPIE practices.

Our community groups hold knowledge in the form of lived and living experience that can make a considerable impact on helping others through research by giving them a voice. The people we work with want to use their experience to inform, challenge and update local and national health and social care policy, strategy, and practice which is something we champion at ARC NWC.”

ARC NWC Senior Research Fellow and Co-investigator of the project Dr Emma Holliday continued, “We have identified that traditional approaches of community consultation and engagement do not work for our community groups and have unfortunately resulted in negative experiences.

We will develop impactful methodologies to include review of existing tools for evaluating success of Patient & Public Involvement and Engagement and methods for evaluating arts based approaches.”

Paul Hine and Andy Smith, the Directors of Made by Mortals, who will lead on the workshops have utilised their theatre and music background where they work with a spectrum of people from diverse lived experience background throughout their careers.

Paul outlined “Evidently fresh approaches to PPIE in research are needed to ensure good quality research that is fit for purpose.

By Drawing on people’s experiences and understanding of the world has always been key to how they co-create theatre and music.”