Participants in Research Experience Survey relaunches in CRN Greater Manchester with new website
Health and social care research participants across Greater Manchester, East Cheshire and East Lancashire are being offered new ways to share their experiences about taking part in a study.
The Participants in Research Experience Survey (PRES) gives people the opportunity to tell the Clinical Research Network what they enjoyed about their experience, what they would prefer to be done differently and whether they would take part in research again.
Our colleagues in the Clinical Research Network North East North Cumbria have developed a website which allows delivery staff the opportunity to offer the PRES to participants in person, via email or by providing a unique code which they can use to complete their survey at a time that suits them.
The website also has a host of accessibility features available to ensure more people are able to share their feedback. These include the ability to translate the survey into multiple languages, change the colour scheme, font size and types and more.
Colleagues from the CRN Greater Manchester delivery team, Stockport NHS Foundation Trust and East Lancashire Hospitals NHS Trust (ELHT) piloted the new platform in October 2023 before the full launch in November 2023, when the platform replaced the previous Google Form option.
Ellen Smith, a Clinical Research Nurse at ELHT, was full of praise for the new website, which is called My Research Experience. She said: “It's a million times easier and more time efficient. You don't feel like you are pressuring families, it's quick, not relying on the post or the expectation to complete face-to-face.”
Around 800 participants have already shared their feedback this year across CRN Greater Manchester (with 50 of them coming through the new platform in the first two weeks) and we are looking forward to seeing how the new platform encourages even more participants to get involved.
A new Greater Manchester PRES Resource Hub has also been launched for research delivery staff across the region. It is a one-stop shop including PRES tutorials, useful links and joining instructions for the weekly PRES drop-in sessions running until Christmas for people who would like to see a demo of the new platform.
For more information about PRES in the region, you can contact our local PRES lead Martin Occleston via learning.lcrnsnorthwest@nihr.ac.uk and the national PRES summary for 2022/23 is now also available.
