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Priority Setting Partnerships
What is a Priority Setting Partnership (PSP)?
Priority Setting Partnerships focus on a particular condition or healthcare issue. They are made up of organisations and people living with the condition, their carers and the healthcare professionals who treat them.
What does a PSP do?
PSPs work to find and prioritise questions that can be answered through research, decided by people living with a condition and healthcare professionals. The PSP will first ask people to complete a survey, highlighting the questions they most want to see answered through research.
Those questions are then prioritised into a final list of Top 10 priorities, which will be available to researchers and research funders. The process is overseen by an organisation called the James Lind Alliance.
What is the James Lind Alliance?
The James Lind Alliance(JLA) is a non-profit-making organisation that was set up in 2004. It brings patients, carers and healthcare professionals together to find and prioritise the unanswered questions about different health conditions. The National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) funds the infrastructure of the JLA, to oversee the processes for PSPs.
Who is involved in the Type 2 diabetes PSP?
Diabetes UK is funding the PSP. The PSP is guided and overseen by a steering group, which includes people living with Type 2 diabetes, healthcare professionals, Diabetes UK staff and the James Lind Alliance.
Why are PSPs important and why is Diabetes UK investing in one?
As the biggest diabetes research charity, it’s important that the research Diabetes UK funds reflects the needs of people with diabetes and those who care for them. The charity needs to influence researchers and other research funders as well.
This process allows us to involve people affected by diabetes and healthcare professionals in those decisions.
The results and their impact
What will happen to the final Top 10 research priorities?
Diabetes UK will publicise the final Top 10 research priorities widely to researchers and organisations that fund diabetes research. The priorities could influence those who work in universities and academic institutions, government agencies or in industry. Diabetes UK will use the priorities in the decisions it makes about how research is funded. The diabetes Clinical Studies Groups will also consider them.
What happens to the questions that are not prioritised or put in the final Top 10?
These questions are not lost. They will be published on the James Lind Alliance website and can still be looked at by Diabetes UK, researchers and other organisations that fund research.
What difference does this process make?
Many areas of research have seen a benefit. For example, people with asthma were asked about their research priorities. Research has since been funded looking specifically at the effects of breathing exercises.
A separate PSP focused on stillbirth and found priorities of parents that hadn’t been considered before. Now, research into bereavement care, maternity care in subsequent pregnancies and helping mothers to respond to the signs and symptoms of stillbirth are priorities.
Type 1 diabetes
Has there been a Priority Setting Partnership for Type 1 diabetes?
Yes. The Top 10 research priorities for Type 1 diabetes were published in 2011. This is available to diabetes researchers and UK research funders. We’re looking for the research priorities for Type 2 diabetes because they have never been identified.
Find out more about the Type 1 diabetes Priority Setting Partnership.
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