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Reporting Patient and Public involvement

The NIHR promotes the involvement of patients and the public (PPI) in all stages of research. The NIHR Journals Library aims to set a standard for the reporting of this involvement, in keeping with its role of providing a comprehensive archive of funded research. All reports should therefore explain how patients and the public have been involved in the study outside of being study participants/research subjects. 

Authors should report faithfully on PPI activity even if only to acknowledge the absence of it within the study. It is now mandatory for all reports to include a separate section on PPI as a sub-heading in the Discussion section. The GRIPP2 form may still be used as described below.

For our Global Health Research reports, we expect authors to provide a section on CEI (community engagement and involvement) in place of a PPI section. Please use this guidance to assist your writing of this section, however we do appreciate that global CEI will have differences to UK PPI, such as navigating complex dynamics of power and distinct ethical frameworks. We would therefore expect you to tailor this section to how you worked with your communities.

In developing your reporting on PPI, please think about the following:

  • If there was no patient and public involvement (PPI) in the study, please state this in your report setting
    out why this was not thought appropriate or was not feasible
  • What form did the PPI take and at what stages did it occur during your study?
  • What impact did PPI have during the study? How was it useful?
  • If there was little/no impact of PPI during the study, please say so
  • The way(s) PPI will support dissemination of the results

When reporting public involvement in any study, please refer to the GRIPP2 Short Form (below) for information on what to include and in which sections of your report this should appear.

You may find it useful to look at some of the following published journal issues for examples of good reporting on patient and public involvement:

  • Issue 2:48 of Health and Social Care Delivery Research
  • Issue 2:04 of Health and Social Care Delivery Research
  • Issue 3:01 of Programme Grants for Applied Research
  • Issue 5:04 of Public Health Research
  • Issue 21:35 of Health Technology Assessment

GRIPP2 Short Form

Section and topic Item Reported on page No
1: Aim Report the aim of PPI in the study  
2: Methods Provide a clear description of the methods used for PPI in the study  
3: Study results Outcomes - Report the results of PPI in the study, including both positive and negative outcomes  
4: Discussion and conclusions Outcomes - Comment on the extent to which PPI influenced the study overall. Describe positive and negative effects  
5: Reflections/critical perspective Comment critically on PPI input in the study, reflecting on the things that went well and those that did not, so others can learn from this experience  
 

This form has been reproduced from Staniszewska et al.1 Published by the BMJ. This is an Open Access article distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.   Includes minor formatting changes to the original text. 

  1. Staniszewska S, Brett J, Simera I, Seers K, Mockford C, Goodlad S et al. GRIPP2 reporting checklists: tools to improve reporting of patient and public involvement in research BMJ 2017; 358 :j3453 https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.j3453
For studies which are mainly about public involvement in research, you may wish to refer to the GRIPP2 Long Form

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