by Dr Rachel Johnson, GP and NIHR Clinical Researcher in Primary Health Care, Centre for Academic Primary Care, University of Bristol
Together with colleagues at the Universities of Bristol, Oxford, Birmingham, Cambridge and Lancaster, I recently completed a James Lind Alliance Priority Setting Partnership for advanced heart failure, funded by the NIHR School for Primary Care Research.
Priority setting partnerships (PSPs) are an established method for involving patients and the public in the first, crucial stage of research – deciding which research questions should be tackled by research studies. The results have just been published in BMJ Open Heart and include a list of the final top 10 priority research questions.
Briefly the process involved:
- conducting a survey to elicit priority questions from a wide range of stakeholders, including patients, carers and clinicians
- excluding questions that had already been addressed in the literature
- ranking the