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.