Research Ready Communities in the West of England YouTube video transcript

Contents

Research Ready Communities. Community Champions share their experience of taking part in the Research Ready Communities project in the West of England.

Holly Ayres, Communications and Engagement Manager talking:

"Research Ready Communities is an exciting new initiative that is being delivered across all 15 regions of the Clinical Research Network. The project is designed to engage underserved groups in health and care research using a community engagement approach. It aims to help communities find out what health and care research is, how it can benefit them and how they can take part in research and it does this by working really closely with local communities. Here in the West of England, we're working with four Community Champions from Swindon who have held focus groups with people from the Goan community, the Hindu community and the Muslim community. Before the workshops they did some training with us to find out more about what health and care research is and during the groups that they help with the communities they shared this information and also listened to the communities about what their current perceptions of research are."

Nadia, Community Champion talking:

"So what motivated me to take part in the programme was, when I was first introduced into it it sort of reminded me of my parents and the lack of knowledge they have around research and anything to do with their medical department, so I thought what better way to kind of get the message across to people in our communities that don't have the opportunities to go out there and get that knowledge."

Sandra, Community Champion talking:

"When I heard of this programme it said research, I always believe in save today for better tomorrow so I knew this was something that I would like to be part of, straight away I said yes."

Nadia, Community Champion talking:

"So what I've done so far as part of the project is work with communities and kind of introduce them to the organisation of NIHR, what they can offer and what research actually is and then what they can do from that is understand research a little bit more and see what kind of things that they would like to get involved in. I've just kind of given them the resources to be able to do that."

Sandra, Community Champion talking:

"As a group we've been talking to a lot of people around in our community. We have had three sessions already, with the Goan community, then we had another session with the other Indian community, the Hindu people involved and we had another session with the Muslim community around Swindon. So we've been talking to a lot of other people as well, one-to-one sessions, regarding this research work that we are involved in."

Nadia, Community Champion talking:

"The challenges that we faced through programme is trying to get some communities more involved. I think lack of understanding in what research is and what, what we can do to help medical research is kind of preventing them to take part so it's quite hard to fight that barrier off and the stigma around research and trying to educate them into knowing how it can actually help and that it's not a bad thing or anything that would hurt them or harm them in any sort of way."

Roslyn, Community Champion talking:

"The best part of the project is the fact that the community members came and they talked about it, they expressed their opinions and they want to find out what we are going to do later on."

Nadia, Community Champion talking:

"I think the best part of taking part in the project was all the knowledge that I gained from being part of the organisation because in order to kind of relay the message about research, I had to do a lot of research on research myself and understand what NIHR are and all the training programs that I've been on which has helped me massively in gaining my own knowledge around the subject and how I can help as well as being able to get other people to be involved. That was quite a nice highlight for me because I didn't know as much about it before."

Maria, Community Champion talking:

"I would really encourage them to take part in whatever comes, never say no to, because the research what has been done years back is beneficial to us at the moment and if we do our part at this moment for generations to come ahead it will benefit them."

Sandra, Community Champion talking:

"My message to the people in the community is please, please, please support research work, it's extremely important, it's extremely important for our future."

Roslyn, Community Champion talking:

"The message will be to come and help us, to join us, so that we can support all the communities to develop something for their health and something that might help them later on, for their children and the environments, so more research, specific research, so the more people we will be engaged, the more help we can bring them."

Maria, Community Champion talking:

"The message to researchers, if you're trying to get in touch with different communities, please make sure that you have your trust with them, which is very important, if they trust you they will do anything for you and go alongside step by step, so if the right support is given to them they will be great in whatever you want them to do."

Nadia, Community Champion talking:

"I think the message that I would give to researchers when they're trying to get communities to be more engaged would be to be very clear about what the research is and what it actually requires from the community, so that the community are able to see clearly what is expected of them and then having information about where they can access this from and easy steps to be able to do this, very simple, easy clear-cut steps so that they're able to access this with ease and minimal support."

In the next phase of the programme the Champions plan to attend local community events to share information about research and raise further awareness.

A huge thank you to Maria, Nadia, Sandra and Roslyn for all their incredible work as part of the programme.

If you're a community organisation in the West of England or you work in research and are looking to engage with community groups we'd love to hear from you.

Please get in touch with our Community Engagement Team at we.ppie@nihr.ac.uk.