For better care: UW/H involves patients in research & teaching

Medical research and teaching in Germany are often carried out without the involvement of patients, although countries such as Denmark have shown that the involvement of patients provides many important impulses. The Chair for the Training of Personal and Interpersonal Skills in Healthcare and the Chair of Health Services Research at Witten/Herdecke University (UW/H) have therefore launched the project "Researching and teaching together with patients" (GePa). The focus is on patients with chronic or long-term illnesses.

Stefan Palmowski is part of the GePa project and is convinced that patients and students will benefit equally: "Students are even better prepared for practice through real diagnoses and stories. Patients can actively contribute to improving the care system and enjoy better treatment."

Patients to enrich various projects with their expertise until 2025

The GePa project will initially run until the end of 2025 and comprises several steps:

• Formation of a steering group: a group made up of representatives from self-help organisations, researchers and patients will collect ideas and clarify fundamental questions, for example: "How much time do patients need to plan for their involvement in the project and what reward should they receive for this?"
• Recruitment of patients: We are looking for 15 to 20 people with long-term or chronic illnesses who would like to actively participate and take part in a structured survey.
• Conducting interviews: The research team conducts interviews with the people involved in order to create the basis for the next project steps.

• Training and qualification: The patients are qualified for their involvement in research and teaching projects so that they can actively participate in these processes.

One example of the active involvement of patients is the supervision of teaching events. Patients could talk about their diagnosis, the path to it and their treatment in seminars. They could also play an important role in exam situations: Actors are often used in exams to simulate anamnesis interviews, for example. Real patients could be used to practise these and other situations much more realistically.

In the area of research, the plan is to involve the patient group in projects from the outset in such a way that suggestions for research topics are generated from within the group. Once the project has been successfully completed at the end of next year, another is to follow in which the patients will each accompany a specific research project and a teaching project.

Further information: The project is taking place in cooperation with the self-help contact centre in Witten. We are still looking for participants, more information can be found here:Projekt GePa | Uni Witten/Herdecke (uni-wh.de)