Involving people with lived experience in the dissemination of your research can add weight and insight and accessibility to the project.  It can showcase the most important findings for people with lived experience, and the best way to explain your project. People with arthritis could also reach or access people that you are unable to. Therefore, the findings and work would have a greater reach, and potentially impact more people affected by arthritis.  

It is really important to share the results of your work with the participants who took part and let them know what the findings are.  Effective dissemination can help identify and generate funding for further research. 

Involving people with arthritis in dissemination and communication could include:  

• Co-presenting the findings of research 
• Co-authoring the publication
• Sharing or writing posts on social media, forums, and other platforms
• Reviewing language and tone
• Co-producing a communications plan, including channels and key messages 
• Suggesting best ways to implement results for maximum impact
• Producing flyers
• Contacting journalists.

Things to remember during this process:  

• Communicate clearly what the involved person will be presenting/sharing.
• Ensure people with lived experience feel comfortable with their role in dissemination.
• Make sure that anyone sharing project outputs has the correct data and guidance on a suitable tone. 
• Make sure you write up your findings simply and clearly, using as little jargon and technical terminology as possible.
• Always remember that you are writing for the general public.

Remember, if a person with lived experience has been involved from the beginning, then they will have ownership and their own knowledge of the project, and may therefore feel more confident writing up and sharing the work.  

How can we support?  

Please come and talk to us about your research results and your plans for sharing your research findings with people with lived experience of arthritis, health professionals and researchers.  Our Research Liaison team will be happy to discuss your results and how we can support your dissemination, please get in touch with them on researchliaison@versusarthritis.org  

Resources 

Stage 5: Disseminating | Faculty of Medicine | Imperial College London 

Useful information on including people with lived experience in the dissemination of research, as well as real life examples of where researchers have used public involvement at this research stage

Free guides (plainenglish.co.uk) This links through to a resource of glossaries, and specialist writing guides including how to write in plain English and tips for accessible websites.  

Link Group toolkit 2024 (keele.ac.uk) This toolkit gives ideas for dissemination across a variety of platforms in a helpful toolkit from page 7.  

The Health Open Research platform, founded by the Association of medical research charities and listed on PubMed Central (an archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature), enables researchers to publish any research outputs regardless of novelty or outcome, supporting reproducibility, transparency and impact.  

Click here for an example and some further advice on how to write up your work in lay language.

PPIE Case studies