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.

Moyosore Olorunoje

Moyosore Olorunoje (Mo) is a Consultant Systemic and Family Psychotherapist, supervisor, trainer and doctoral researcher with extensive experience across the NHS, third sector, education and independent practice. She has worked as a Visiting Lecturer at the Tavistock and as a Co-Lead Tutor with the Institute of Family Therapy (IFT), contributing to the teaching and development of systemic practitioners.

Mo has a longstanding interest in creating reflective spaces in which complexity, relationships and wider social contexts can be explored with curiosity. Her clinical, supervisory and teaching practice is informed by systemic thinking, with particular interests in culture, identity, intersectionality, and decolonial ideas. She is especially interested in how dominant ways of knowing shape whose knowledge, voices and experiences are recognised and valued.

She is currently undertaking a Professional Doctorate in Systemic Practice at the Tavistock. Her doctoral research explores the intersections of race, gender and body size using Sista Circle Methodology (SCM). Her research interests include culturally responsive and participatory approaches to systemic research, embodiment and reflexivity, with a particular curiosity about the relationship between the researcher, participants and the knowledge they create together.