Community Engagement & Involvement
CEI
CEI – Community Engagement & Involvement – is central to our African-led research process and prioritisation. However, currently, CEI in research involving all phases of surgery is not yet well established in most African settings.
We aim to establish meaningful community engagement at local, national and pan-African levels allowing use to work together to produce the research which is most relevant to patients. This will involve developing links with civil society, policy-makers and health professionals across partner nations and to ensure that our research impacts patient care.
Our Objectives
Our three main activities, informed by the UNICEF CEI standards, are:
- Producing a CEI strategy on how local teams will reach, engage with and involve relevant community stakeholders
- We will give a voice to community views about surgery, and empower them to participate in the research agenda
- Community members, at grassroots level CEI, will be involved in the life course of each research project, ranging from the approach to patient recruitment to dissemination of key research findings for non-medical audiences
Update
- We have developed a training program for CEI and have held three NIHR Community Engagement training sessions to help members of APPRISE to better understand the concept of community engagement and involvement.
- Our CEI team have been working with the ACIOS project to develop a protocol which is understandable by different communities in the countries we are working in.
- In Uganda, a combined CEI strategy for the digital health systems project will see a formal process to engage with the community at all levels (health care workers, policy makers, patients themselves) to identify important perioperative data that is useful for dissemination/ display.
