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.

​Indeed, I would say that my thoughts so far on PPI and Embedded Research is that it is either a non-issue or one that is not very high up on the ‘to do’ list. I am really hoping that this is not actually the case and maybe in the coming months exemplary examples of PPI will come flooding into Embedded Research Project Central.

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.

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.

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.
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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. 

As one of the four lay representatives for the Embedded Research project, I want to share some thoughts about some of the Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) issues that are coming up in the initial part of the project.
 
We had a pretty good idea that Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) would not feature very much in the lives of embedded researchers and this proved to be the case from  the literature researches and the preliminary data gathering.