Policies

Policies

Patient and public partnership

Taking the lead from The BMJ’s innovative patient partnership strategy, several journals from BMJ’s portfolio are now encouraging their authors to participate.

BMJ believes that partnering with patients, their carers, support networks, and the public is an ethical imperative and essential to improving the quality, safety, value, and sustainability of health systems and research.

Foremost among the changes introduced is the requirement for all authors submitting research papers to include a “Patient and Public Involvement Statement” within the methods section of their paper describing how they involved patients and the public in their research.

This step has been taken to support and encourage an international movement towards active involvement of patients and the public as co producers of research. This is seen as best practice by funders and ethical review boards We fully appreciate that this is a movement in evolution and not all researchers will have involved patients and the public in their studies. We also recognise that for some papers co-production may not be appropriate. For this reason we continue to consider clinical research papers where there has been no patient and public involvement but ask all authors to state this in the methods section of their papers.

The following BMJ Journals also now require all authors to include a Patient and Public Involvement Statement:

Better together: patient partnership in medical journals

In addition to advocacy for co production of research, The BMJ’s strategy includes other core elements aimed towards co producing its full content which includes Scholarly comment and Educational articles as well as Research papers, News and Views. In addition it actively promotes patient and public involvement in conferences and we believe The BMJ’s experience can be a springboard for other journals.

Elements of the BMJ’s patient partnership strategy which are spreading within the BMJ’s Portfolio of journals includes the following.

Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery and Psychiatry: Patient Editorial Board for JNNP >>

BMJ Sexual & Reproductive Health: Patient and public involvement in sexual and reproductive health >>

British Journal of Sports Medicine: Introducing participatory sports and exercise medicine via ‘Patient Voices’ >>