News
Patient Engagement Resource Centre now available
At Lygature, we strongly believe that involving people with lived experience of a medical condition in research projects increases the relevance, acceptance and impact of medical research.
Lygature has experience with setting up and managing the activities of patient representative groups within research consortia, who present invaluable insights to the project and ultimately improve its results. Lygature has supported the patient involvement activities of APPROACH, RADAR-CNS, RADAR-AD and other projects.
We are therefore very eager to promote the recently launched Patient Engagement Resource Centre (PERC), a platform designed to help researchers better engage patients in their research.
The PERC is an initiative from EATRIS and the European Patients’ Forum (EPF), together with affiliated partner European AIDS Treatment Group (EATG). The PERC was developed as part of the Horizon 2020 project, EATRIS-Plus.
Our colleagues Tieneke Schaaij-Visser and Vera Nies, Program Managers at Lygature, supported the creation of the platform by providing needs and experiences from the perspective of long-term collaboration within consortia.
The PERC is an easy to navigate platform that offers publicly available guidance, training and practical tools to help researchers get started with patient engagement. It is also a practical tool for patients to access and promote to the researchers they collaborate with. The Centre features selected relevant public resources to help researchers understand the basics of patient engagement, and guide them through the different phases of patient engagement (from planning to conducting and evaluating), with the ultimate aim to foster meaningful patient engagement practices in research.
If you are interested to learn more about how Lygature is putting patients in the centre of research consortia, make sure to look at this video ‘The value of patient insights in APPROACH’. APPROACH is an EU-wide research consortium that sought to develop guidelines for diagnosing the right osteoarthritis patient for the right treatment. With support from Lygature, a Patient Council representing the perspectives of people living with osteoarthritis was set up in the early phase of the project. The video explains how this Patient Council contributes to improving the experiences in and engagement of clinical study participants with the study, helps with the dissemination and sustainability of project results, and builds a valuable dialogue between patient representatives and APPROACH researchers that ultimately improves project outcomes.
If you want to know more about how to involve patients in your project in the most effective way, please contact Tieneke or Vera.