Welcome to our on-line public involvement evaluation tool. The tool is designed to be an easy, participative and enjoyable way to evaluate the quality of public involvement. It can be particularly useful in situations where it may be difficult for everyone to meet up face to face.

There has been increasing emphasis on the need to evaluate public involvement for a number of reasons, including demonstrating impact and value for money to funders. Fundamental to successful public involvement is the idea that people with different kinds of knowledge need to work together to solve complex problems, e.g. people involved in the delivery of services may need to work with scientists and patients or the public to tackle an important issue. These people need to be able to share their different perspectives on an equal basis, so that the value of each person’s contribution is understood and acknowledged. This may sound obvious enough but in practice, it is often difficult to achieve. There are a number of reasons for this. Traditionally, in our society, scientific knowledge has been seen as more valuable than other forms of knowledge. Furthermore, organisations are often hierarchical in structured and are working with limited time and resources and in competition with one another. All these things can work against the possibility of creating egalitarian working relationships between professionals and patients and the public. What does the evaluation involve?

So, how do we know if we have created genuinely egalitarian working relationships that are needed to maximise the potential of public involvement? We have developed a four dimensional framework that will allow you to ‘map’ the quality of your public involvement. This involves you rating your involvement along four different dimensions. The tool allows you to do this using sliders. You can also add comments to explain or give additional information on the reasons for your rating using the text box provided. Different people can log in and record their responses so that a visual representation of the ‘map’ of your involvement can be built up. The tool can be used within the same project at different points in time to identify important issues, provide feedback and assess progress in addressing them. It can also be used to compare involvement between different projects or organisations.

We hope you enjoy using the on-line tool and find it helpful to you in setting up and developing your public involvement. You can find out more about our approach to evaluating public involvement below. Gibson, A., Welsman, J., & Britten, N. (2017). Evaluating patient and public involvement in health research: from theoretical model to practical workshop. Health Expectations, 20(5), 826-835. https://doi.org/10.1111/hex.12486