In this blog series we will be featuring our award winners and highly commended recipients from the Faculty’s ‘Outstanding Contribution to PPIE’ awards. Showcasing the inspirational and outstanding commitment to PPIE that has made a positive difference to our community and highlighting the amazing events, activities, people and groups from across the Faculty.

Our next blog in this series will feature Lindsey Brown, a Public Contributor who worked with staff and patient representatives to develop a suite of resources to help postgraduate students develop their lay language skills. Lindsey won the Public Contributor: Highly Commended category for the 2022 awards.

Since 2016, Lindsey Brown has been a Public Contributor working with University staff and patient representatives to develop a suite of resources to help postgraduate students develop their lay language skills. Originally jointly funded by Manchester Academy for Healthcare Scientist Education (MAHSE), MSc Clinical Immunology, and the FBMH Social Responsibility PPIE in the curriculum fund.

Lay language is terminology that the average non-professional can understand and is highly important in clinical settings and in communicating research to the general public. This suite of teaching resources aimed to help students develop their lay communication skills and then apply those skills, talking to patients with lived experiences of conditions they were studying.

Both patients and students provided excellent feedback, which resulted in repeated annual patient-student events with the resources and assessments being developed further. In 2020-2021, Lindsey began to include other patient representatives in the delivery and assessment of the sessions, passing on her knowledge and resources.

In 2020, Lindsey lead a project to canvas the public on their understanding of 20 commonly used words in healthcare sciences. Despite the 2020 lockdown, the project went ahead on social media and was coined the #DailyDefinitionChallenge and generated 1100 responses in one month. The results have been curated so far into 3 separate teaching videos and evaluated with over 400 students to date. This project won the JOVE Education Innovation award in 2022.

The feedback from students was extremely positive and resulted in the students being more receptive to using plain language when discussing research and healthcare with members of the public. The resources have been used year on year. Some have already been rolled out onto other courses and the aim is to now share them with a wider audience.

Twitter:

• Lindsey Brown: @LindseyBwork
• MAHSE: @MAHSE1
• UoM MSc Clinical Immunology: @UoM_PGT_Immuno
• Dr Joanne Pennock: @immunoJo

To find out more about PPIE: watch our short film, sign up to the monthly Public Engagement Digest, visit the PPIE blog, or contact srbmh@manchester.ac.uk.

To read more about other PPIE Award winners visit here

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