Patient involvement

What is meant by the patient involvement?

Patient involvement means that you as a patient and citizen can play a part in research projects by bringing your interests and opinions to research projects and thereby impacting research.

Why are patients involved in the general practice research networks?

Through the involvement and participation of patients and citizens, research projects and general practices should be oriented toward the needs and interests of the patients. This increases the relevance of research projects.

Also, it ensures that important findings from GP reach the general population.

How are patients involved?

As a patient, you can participate in research in different ways:

• As a consultant, you can, for example, give helpful advice on which research topics are interesting from the patient’s point of view or contribute to the development of questionnaires, interview guidelines, and study information.
• As a co-researcher, you can help to approach other patients for participation in another study, collect data or interpret results.
• As a co-author, you can, for example, help to formulate study results in an understandable way for the general population and help to disseminate them via suitable communication channels

The individual research practice networks, of the DESAM-ForNet initiative, involve patients in their research in their practice in different ways. You can find out about the possibilities in each case by contacting the network in your region.

An overview of the GP research practice networks and the contact person for the patient participation can be found here:

Contact persons for participation:

This map shows the GP practice networks associated with the DESAM-ForNet initiative.

Here you can find the contact persons for the participation and patient involvement in your region.

If you have any questions, please contact the coordination office at any time!

We will support you in finding a contact person from the research practice networks to participate in the research and will be happy to advise you in detail.