Research Reflection Panels: Engaging, more voices in more research

Context: Family Medicine (FM) and NAPCRG champion involving patients and communities in research. Clinical practitioners, patients, and community representatives increasingly make major contributions to primary care (PC) research.

Objective: Grow the power of participation by adopting use of Research Reflection Panels (RRPs) in studies of all kinds, even those without direct involvement of patients or other individuals.

Study Design: RRPs can empower research teams by engaging diverse voices, broad experience, and vital knowledge to strengthen studies across research methods, study designs, topics, problems, processes, and populations.

Setting: RRPs can apply beyond clinical research to the variety of PC studies and settings. Panels can be created for individual studies or continue for institutions or programs.

Population Studied: Simply the process of asking, “Who do we need around this table?” can challenge and change the research question, team, and plan. Who does and understands this work? Who lives and heals in this space? Who has deep knowledge, close to the ground and near to the folks? Who has the map of the land mines? Who cares? In PC research, the usual default members include patients, clinical practitioners, and learners.

Intervention: RRPs require authentic engagement of diverse panel members early in the study process and continuing through all phases of research and dissemination. Researcher commitment is usually short of the full partnership and study ownership considered in Community-Based Participatory Research. Panel members need information about expectations, time and effort, study duration, panel membership, ethical approval, and potential conflicts of interest.

Outcomes: Potential RRP benefits include improvements in research questions, scope, recruitment, procedures, resources, analysis, understanding, application, and dissemination.

Results: We have developed RRPs for online surveys, intervention trials, and analyses of large data sets. RRPs can help improve studies, empower application of findings, and build research teams and programs. They can generate ideas, foresee problems, and develop solution. Engagement efforts like RRPs are increasingly expected for research funding and reporting.

Conclusions: RRPs are a modest extension of the PC tradition to engage more voices in more research. They offer a practical yet potentially powerful tool to improve the planning, conduct, experience, and application of research.