Public and community partnerships (PCP) – creation of principles   

In April and May 2025, a group of 29 people from across England worked together as a Public and Community Partnerships (PCP) co-creation group. The group was made up of different people: some work for local authorities, some in community groups, and others were members of the public, and from national and regional NIHR groups. Everyone shared their thoughts and experiences and the different ways people and communities can be involved in local authority research. 

The group explored a range of existing PCP related frameworks and models. They talked about what they thought was important and shared their hopes for how this should work in the future. The group came up with 7 principles to make sure PCP is meaningful and impactful in local authority research.  

What next for the principles? 

We are developing a PCP Funding Award to explore, test and evaluate new ways of involving people and communities in public health research. The funding award, like the principles has been developed with the co-creation group.   

Over the next two years, we’ll be teaming up with awardees of our PCP award funding and our co-creation group to test how best to use these principles and learn from them.  

We want to find the best ways to make public and community involvement work well in local authority research. Together, we’ll develop a framework or infographic that others can use to make sure their research in local authorities is using best PCP practice.  

What does PCP mean? 

We use the term PCP to describe all activities local authorities do to involve and engage the public, communities and people with lived experience in public health research.  Local authorities use different names and approaches to describe what we refer to as public and community partnerships including:   

• co-production   

• co-design  

• community researchers  

• participatory research   

• peer research