Our five-day comprehensive hands-on and interactive training will provide methods, tools and critical analysis to engage and involve communities in knowledge production and action learning in your global health research.
When it comes to global health, structural racism, hierarchies of knowledge and inequalities in power dynamics shape research agendas, practices and outcomes.
Many global health funders expect grant recipients to incorporate community engagement and involvement (CEI) into their research design, implementation, and dissemination approaches, ensuring that the communities most affected by health challenges play a central and active role in generating knowledge and action to tackle them.
Also known as social participation in health (SPH), or public engagement and involvement, CEI ensures knowledge production in global health research is inclusive, decolonised and power aware.
IDS is the only provider offering in-person training in this theme, providing a unique opportunity to bring your own challenges and experiences relating to your work or research for discussion, to learn from your peers and grow your professional network.
The course will cover core principles, innovative methodological approaches and critical analysis for CEI in research. The approaches and methods we are encouraging you to adopt and integrate into your work will be modelled in the design and delivery of the course.
Our facilitators have decades of experience between them, each bringing distinct areas of expertise within the complexities of Community Engagement and Involvement work (CEI) in the health space. Their works spans regions that include Africa, Latin America, Australasia, the MENA region, the US and UK.
Erica Nelson, Research Fellow, IDS Health and Nutrition Cluster, has over 20 years of experience working on issues of community-based public health, health systems development and citizen-led accountability processes, sexual and reproductive health and rights, and the politics of knowledge in health research.
Tom Barker, Senior Health Convenor, IDS Health and Nutrition Cluster, has over 20 years of experience working in knowledge brokering, research communication, policy engagement, and parliamentary influencing in the UK health, global health and international development policy arenas, as well as collaboration with partners in Sub-Saharan Africa and Asia.
Tom and Erica contribute as joint CEI leads on the NIHR-funded BSMS Global Health Research Unit on Neglected Tropical Diseases (NTDs) at Brighton and Sussex Medical School (BSMS). This course reflects ongoing collaboration with the Centre for Global Health Research, a partnership of over 25 institutions within and beyond Sussex engaged in research that benefits the health and wellbeing of citizens in Official Development Assistance (ODA) countries.
Rene Loewenson, Director, Training and Research Support Centre (TARSC), is an epidemiologist, public health practitioner, a founding member of EQUINET in east and southern Africa and co-ordinator of the global Shaping health network and the Making Change Visible team. Rene has over 40 years’ experience and since 1980, has implemented participatory action research, policy analysis and training, as well as leading international research consortia on equity and social participation in health.
This course is for researchers involved in or planning to be involved in global health initiatives or international health research collaborations, who have been tasked with:
- Social participation in health.
- Public engagement and involvement.
- Community engagement and involvement.
We welcome applications from CEI practitioners who want to build their skills, particularly if they are new to international health research collaborations.
We also work with participatory research practitioners who are new to working in the health space, as well as public/global health researchers who have some prior experience of working at community level but not yet in the context of co-produced research.
Past participants have come from organisations such as the Wellcome Trust, Childrens Investment Fund, Médecins Sans Frontières, KNCV Tuberculosis Foundation, the UK and US Higher Education sectors (University of Southampton, University of Manchester, Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine), the Aga Khan University and the George Institute for Global Health.
IDS courses are interactive, inclusive, participatory and applied. As such you are encouraged to bring your challenges and experiences into the learning space.
This course follows the logic of a project or programme life cycle.
Each day we will focus on the principles, methods and approaches relevant to the challenges of distinct phases of undertaking CEI within the context of health research, e.g. establishing trust, community sensemaking, adapting and learning, accountability cycles, collective analysis, and mobilising learning for change.
We will cover topics including:
- Understanding and analysing forms of CEI/SPH and power in diverse communities in health.
- Ethical dimensions of community-engaged research, dynamics of inclusivity in practice.
- Action and adaptive learning as participatory and strategic processes.
- Shaping health policy and practice through CEI/SPH and participatory monitoring and evaluation.
Some of these themes relate to course materials previously developed by IDS for the National Institute for Health and Care Research (NIHR). Others use globally developed and applied materials. This course differs in that it will give you an opportunity to dive more deeply into methods and issues, including those raised in virtual courses, and to generate new skills and learning through practical mentored application of methods and peer-to-peer engagement.
The course will contribute to the learning objectives through modelling – in design and delivery – the approaches and methods we are encouraging you to adopt and integrate into your work.
In an adaptive learning approach we provide time for reflection, feedback, and review in the five-day cycle.
IDS short courses provide a unique opportunity to bring your own challenges and experiences relating to your work or research for discussion.
Our training also enables you to grow your professional network and learn from others working in the field of global health.
This course will enable you to better empower communities to be actively and thoughtfully engaged in health research processes.
At the end of this course, you will be able to:
- Design, implement, analyse and ‘make public’ the outcomes of community engagement and involvement in health research from a power-aware perspective.
- Adapt participatory Monitoring, Evaluation and Learning (MEL) approaches to health research.
- Shape health policy and practice through the application of CEI/SPH approaches.
- Integrate CEI/SPH and analytic tools for it through project and programme life cycles.
- Develop strategies for creating space within research processes for the meaningful inclusion of a diversity of community members and stakeholders’ perspectives.
- Have a deeper understanding of the intersecting experiences of power, stigma, marginalisation, and exclusion, so that you can develop contextually grounded and reflexive research and engagement in partnership with communities.
- Demonstrate to the global health research community how you can creatively embed and integrate CEI/SPH throughout research processes and wider programmatic functions, including through close collaboration between researchers, communication and public engagement professionals and communities.
