December 2024

Patient Engagement Holiday Message

Written By: Carla Southward, PhD

As the year comes to a close, our youth, parent, and community partners are busy co-designing a three-part webinar series to support clinicians, researchers, and trainees with practical skills and knowledge on engaging patients as partners in research. This initiative arose out of a need identified by POPCORN’s Needs Assessment, where Patient Engagement training was identified as the largest research education gap among survey respondents. Not wanting to reinvent the wheel, as there are so many existing resources out there, what started as a hypothetical question about creating something truly led by youth and parents based off their experiences (good and bad) as partners, has turned into a national collaboration.

Using storytelling as a medium for learning, the three-part webinar series will take the learner through a journey of deconstructing any preconceived notions of patient engagement, reflect and rethink how patient engagement can be done meaningfully, and reimage what it would take to put it into practice.

In addition to the webinar series, we will be co-writing a paper to share the learnings through a written medium. Our target is to have content developed and ready for piloting before the end of the fiscal year so stay tuned on hearing more details! It has been an honour to see so much passion, creativity, and expertise being brought into this project and we cannot wait to share it broadly.

To learn more about ways to get involved in POPCORN research, please email the POPCORN team at popcorn@micyrn.ca.