Establishing a public involvement network for chronic pain research in the United Kingdom

Introduction: The Consortium to Research Individual, Interpersonal and Social Influences in Pain (CRIISP) is a 4‐year UKuniversity collaboration investigating how thoughts and feelings, personal relationships and lifestyle can affect chronic pain.Patient and public involvement in research recognises that researchers' conceptions of health and illness can be enriched andsense‐checked by those of people experiencing a health condition. Published literature reports a gap in meaningful patient andpublic involvement in research into chronic pain, for example, during early study design. Input in this formative stage aimed toensure the research proposed had a patient‐centred focus which may benefit study implementation.We describe how the authors sought to address this gap and established a diverse public involvement (PI) network to supportthe CRIISP research.Methods: Thirty‐six adult public contributors were appointed to work alongside the research teams. Lessons learned arepresented under the themes: optimising collaborative working, recruitment of public contributors, supporting public involve-ment throughout CRIISP and the retention of public contributors. Throughout this paper, we refer to the term ‘publicinvolvement’ rather than ‘patient and public involvement’ in accordance with the NIHR definition which incorporates peoplewith a range of experiences.Results: Working in partnership with our public contributors, we have embedded PI throughout a chronic pain researchprogramme using an innovative and collaborative process.Conclusion: This model may inform others to maximise the potential of PI within their research.Patient or Public Contribution: The paper reports the collaboration between public contributors with a lived experience ofchronic pain and the Consortium to Research Individual, Interpersonal and Social influences in Pain (CRIISP) researchers, bymeans of a large public involvement network