Opening up ideas: an advent calendar for patient and public engagement in clinical trials research.

The involvement of patients and the public in research is now an expectation in research with funders requesting a clear plan of involvement and engagement. In the United Kingdom involvement typically focuses on research prioritisation, design and delivery, in contrast activities that share the results of research or research methods more generally are considered to be engagement. Clinical trials tend to concentrate on involvement activities with less emphasis on engagement. To promote engagement activities in the context of clinical trials we asked people attending the 2022 International Clinical Trials Methodology Conference to share ideas on how we can best engage with patients and the public. Responses were reviewed and 22 themes identified. One suggestion was to create an advent calendar and so these 22 themes plus two from the authors were used as a daily tweet from the 1st to the 24th December 2022. Here we share these ideas and draw comparisons between engagement activities in research and traditions of the Christmas period. The ideas shared are not intended as a definitive list but instead a novel way to start discussions between experts by experience, researchers, health professionals and communities to facilitate co-production of meaningful engagement strategies. Patient and public involvement and engagement are terms used to describe specific activities that have a variety of goals from information giving through topublic co-production of research. Involvement and engagement are important as they can help reduce waste in research by ensuring that the research is relevant, conducted well and that the results are shared to those that will use them to make decisions about treatments, including patients. In the United Kingdom the term “engagement” usually refers to activities that focus mainly on information giving, for example sharing the results of research or information about how research is done in general. In this commentary we share ideas for engagement activities that were collected from people attending the International Clinical Trials Methodology Conference in 2022. One of the ideas shared was to have an advent calendar and we have used this to draw comparisons between traditions surrounding the Christmas period and engagement of patients and the public. We share 24 different ideas in the form of a printable advent calendar and invite the clinical trials community, including experts by experience, to reflect on these to generate more ideas for meaningful engagement activities so that everyone who will use the results of research has the opportunity to shape, share, and benefit from research.

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© 2023. The Author(s).