Involving Patients in Research: Considering Good Practice

Increasingly, patients and members of the public are involved in the design, conduct and dissemination of research. INVOLVE, the UK's national body for patient and public involvement, usefully defines this sort of involvement as: 'research being carried out " with " or " by " members of the public rather than " to " , " about " or " for " them' (INVOLVE, 2012). At the Musculoskeletal Research Unit in Bristol, we are often asked about our patient involvement work. In light of the questions that we are asked, this editorial highlights some current practice and guidance. We also reflect on the impact of our patient involvement activity and hope that this serves as a useful in-troduction and points interested readers to further reading. Why involve patients in research? Rationale for involving patients in study design are multi-ple, and include moral and ethical arguments about citi-zens' rights, increasing relevance of research, and the view that doing so can improve research quality, although this may be hard to define (Fudge et al., 2008; Gibson et al., 2012; Ward et al., 2010). There are many examples of pa-tient involvement in research, and patients have been in-volved at different stages in the research process, including: • Identification of research priorities and agenda