Determine if your idea is practical to implement and acceptable to both health care professionals and consumers. Identify what benefits the trial might bring to your patients, their carers and/or the wider community. The best way to discover this is to ask them!
Research is no longer conducted on patients, but for and with them. How will you involve health consumer representatives – people with lived experience – throughout the research cycle? The NHMRC Statement on consumer and community involvement in health and medical research, Appendix 3 outlines considerations at different points in the research cycle, starting with ‘Deciding what to research.
Doing Research Together is an innovative online resource to help researchers, consumers, carers and healthcare workers collaborate on health and medical research projects. This resource provides practical tips and tools for applying co-design {Glossary} principles and co-delivering research projects from start to end. It includes downloadable tools and templates and offers guidance through all stages of the health and medical research cycle.
Co-design takes lots of resources. If you do not have the time or funds to support and train a group of health consumers as equal members of the design team, do not use the co-design label. But make sure you still involve health consumers in your planning.
