Investing in Engagement
How long term-funding leads to impactful research
Well-funded engagement enables the development of long-term, mutually beneficial relationships which are essential for continually improving, progressive programmes that result in an engaged research culture and impactful research.
Impactful research
Providing Motivation
Researchers are aware that funders increasingly expect meaningful engagement with external audiences. For medical science researchers particularly, there is an expectation that patients and the public will be involved in research design and communications. Regardless of this, our researchers are independently realising that engagement makes their research better not only through their own improved communication skills, but more importantly though increased societal relevance of their research. This can be through new collaboration opportunities, a wider range of perspectives on their research, or access to stakeholder audiences who would otherwise not have a voice, but for whom the research is particularly relevant.
Pathways to impact
Our research has been enhanced through strategic engagement activities. For instance, an increasing number of research programmes now include strong Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) practice supported by the engagement team. Focus groups and workshops now routinely inform our research questions, methodologies, and future directions. The Body-Focused Repetitive Behaviours project exemplifies this lived-experience approach, combining research with public engagement and drawing on lived experiences from both the Principal Investigator and patient community members brought together by charity partnerships to design new research foci.
Engagement initiatives have also catalysed unexpected research opportunities. The Football on the Brain project, initially designed to apply neuroscience to football, generated recurring audience questions that are evolving into new research directions, including studies on the neuroscience of Anterior Cruciate Ligament (ACL) injuries.
Our Inclusive Scanning project takes a broader approach, involving public contributors to improve our tools, methodologies and communications to achieve greater ethnic diversity among research participants. By increasing ethnic diversity among study participants, this initiative aims to make our MRI research findings more representative and relevant to wider populations, ultimately leading to better health outcomes.
Having a strong engagement team improves the quality and speed with which researchers can fulfil funder requirements with regards to lived experience and PPI activity, resulting in greater societal impact of the research. It also allows for projects that improve research practice more widely (e.g. Inclusive Scanning).