Conference Agenda

It’s 10 years since the Vancouver Statement (Towle et al, 2016), a statement aimed at decision makers responsible for the education of health and social care which clearly articulates the need to involve patients and carers in the education of health and social care professionals. It’s timely to revisit the concept of partnership and education, with a focus on healthcare professions, but recognising the transferability to other professions. In the UK, health and social care professional education is formalised in Higher Education. We propose a workshop that brings lessons learned in health professions to other areas of higher education and education research.

Partnerships are not a static concept; they evolve over time and move from patient involvement to patient partnerships. This evolution takes time to nurture and face numerous challenges including shifting hierarchical structures, barriers in communication, curriculum redesign, in addition to staff and time resources. Appropriate support and organisational change are needed to reap the advantages of partnerships including diverse perspectives, knowledge exchange, learning from, with and about each other.

We argue it is essential to flatten hierarchical relationships, learning from patients, not just to advance health research but also to ensure education research does not become another tool to legitimise actions we have come to accept as the norm. Patient partners can help us generate new knowledge and challenge assumptions. In education research, there is a need for diverse stakeholder inclusion to challenge educational inequalities.

Building partnerships into education research starts with a partnership in education, where patient educators bring a unique skill set and positionality. In our context, undergraduate and post-graduate medicine and health professions professional programmes, partner with the Patient | Carer Community (PCC) who deliver teaching and mentor students.

We enhance education and research in education if we authentically engage with patients as partners. Ultimately, we want to support best practice in healthcare, which includes tackling health inequalities. This means valuing the patient experience and patient knowledge. Our PCC-educators also bring knowledge of teaching and learning. While academic and clinical educators are accountable to professional standards and Higher Education policy guidance, PCC-educators are guided by authentic learning goals that consider what the learner needs to best care for the patient in front of them.

Unfortunately, over the years, our PCC-educators have found they can operate outside the established practices and structures which positions them on the margins. This marginalisation is counter-productive to partnerships. In this workshop, we will trace the lack of perceived value experienced, to differences in how education and teaching philosophies are understood. A PCC-educator from Leeds will guide participants to reflect on a humanist teaching philosophy. Participants will work in groups to analyse the implications of teaching philosophies for conducting educational research. In this way, we explore how we move from positioning patients and caregivers as primarily providing lived experience to being partners in shaping research agendas (Richards et al , 2025). Partnerships can feel tokenistic with a tendency to defer to professional expertise.

On a practical level, partnership working means having a shared language to discuss our differences and commonalities, ideally learning from each other. Teaching someone the ‘language’ of education is education. Thus, on the one hand, we educate patients and carers to be educators, and on the other, patient-educators educate our future doctors. We believe the approach taken at the University of Leeds to empowering PCC-educators to teach our students can apply to partnership working in research and scholarship. Ultimately, through partnership with the PCC, and engaging with the PCC’s maxim of ‘person first, patient second,’ we challenge paradigmatic thinking that privileges scientific knowledge, objectivity and technology (e.g. AI).