Welcome!

Hello there and welcome to our community involvement blog page. In this blog you’ll find general information about what we are doing and how our community involvement activities relate to our research.

We are a team of researchers at the Medical School at University of Bristol with a programme of research about vaccination for adults aged 55 and over.  You can find out more about who we are here and about our research project ‘What does vaccination mean to people aged 55+?’ here. The research is funded by the National Institute for Health Research (NIHR) and the community involvement activities are also funded by the NIHR HPRU in Behavioural Science and Evaluation at University of Bristol.

What is community involvement?

The answer to this depends very much on who you’re asking because of the many ways of doing things together! We believe community involvement includes open discussions with you so that we can listen to and understand your views better, and work collaboratively with you, so your views shape the research. It’s important to us because we want our research to be relevant to the people it affects and be as useful and impactful as possible.

We have an ongoing community engagement project for adults aged 55 and over, with plans to carry out activities in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland.

Our plans include:

• A questionnaire where we ask what kind of activities people might like to attend and whether they would prefer to do this in person or online
• A workshop where we plan a community event together with some members of the public. Again, this could be online or in person.
• A community event where we open the doors and invite people to share their views and experiences with us and others in their community. We will also invite 2 people who took part in the planning workshop to deliver the event with us.
• Writing about it, as we researchers tend to do! But this time we want to invite 1-2 people from the community to write with us.

These activities will be held in locations where we are doing research: Tewkesbury, Cardiff, Glasgow and Belfast. If activities are held in an online only format, people from our national research locations will be welcome to attend.

For people helping us plan or carry out activities, we are compensating for their time based on £20 per hour of activity. This £20 will be in the form of a high street voucher. If you’d like to be involved or would just like to know more, you can fill in the questionnaire or call 0117 455 7657 or email grp-vaccinesinolderadults@groups.bristol.ac.uk

We’d love to hear your thoughts about our plans and are open to suggestions for activities. Feel free to leave a comment below!