Plenary 3: Empty promises or paradigm shifting? Learning and dilemmas from 20 years of user involvement and engagement

Plenary Description

Patient and Public Involvement and Engagement (PPIE) is frequently cited as a method to generating more valid, impactful, and inclusive outcomes. However, the realities of good quality involvement well are not straightforward.

This session will open dialogue about what genuine involvement looks like in practice, inviting participants to move beyond idealised notions and engage with the messy realities. Moving between theory and practice - from Foucault to lived experience - participants will reflect on their own assumptions, practices, and positionality in relation to PPIE.

We will interrogate what it means move toward a genuine openness to question, share power, and embrace complexity. This session aims to support more honest, reflective, and transformative approaches to collaboration with patients, families, and the public.

Biographies

Professor Liz Forbat

Professor Liz Forbat is a research psychologist and family therapist. Her research and clinical practice focus on how families and relationships are impacted when someone gets ill, for example with cancer or other life-limiting and life-threatening conditions.

Professor Forbat's research projects centralise patient/carer involvement, to ensure that the work she does is always grounded in their priorities.

Professor Forbat also supervises doctoral students on topics such as family and professional relationships in palliative care, prostate cancer service development.

Dr Ramón Karamat Ali 

Dr Ramón Karamat Ali works as the Research Lead on the Master’s programme in Family & Systemic Psychotherapy in Manchester and is a senior lecturer at the Tavistock Centre where he offers research supervision to systemic students and is a tutor on the Family and Systemic Psychotherapy Supervision course. With a Dutch colleague he teaches on their Transcultural systemic supervision course in the Netherlands.

Ramón’s interests started with issues of identity in mixed-race individuals, as well as bilingualism. He did his doctoral research (2013) on adolescent self-harm and triadic attachment processes in families. He continues to be interested in issues of cultural competency in practice and reflective processes in the realm of teaching and training. His most recent pursuit is the area of mandated therapy for trainee family therapists, termed Personal Learning Therapy (Karamat Ali & Taylor, in press). He hopes that some of his supervision and teaching on research makes it "less scary" and enthuses students and therapists to engage with and integrate research more intentionally into their thinking and various systemic practices.

Other speakers will be added soon...