Priority Setting Partnership

An accessible summary produced by Aziza Sallam, Postdoctoral Research Associate

Background

Many people live with more than one long-term health condition at the same time, such as diabetes, heart disease, arthritis, depression, or chronic infections. This is called multiple long-term conditions (MLTC). Living with MLTC can be very challenging. People often need to see many different health and care professionals, attend lots of appointments, and manage several treatments or medicines at once. This can be stressful and confusing for patients and carers, and costly for the health system. 

Different ways of organising health and social care, known as models of care, have been tried to make support for people with MLTC more joined up. These might include: 

• Care provided by a team of different professionals working together, 

• Support based in the community rather than hospital, or 

• Using digital tools to help people manage their health. 

However, it is still unclear which parts of these models work best, and what matters most to people with MLTC, their families, and the professionals who care for them. 

A Priority Setting Partnership (PSP) is a way of bringing together patients, carers, and professionals to decide what research questions are the most important to answer. 

What we will do (the PSP process) 

The process has several steps: 

1. Setting up the Steering Group: A small group of patients, carers, professionals, and researchers who will guide the project and make sure it is fair and inclusive. 

2. Survey 1 (Gathering questions): We will ask people with MLTC, carers, and professionals what questions they have about how care is organised and delivered. 

3. Refining the questions: The research team and Steering Group will check and combine similar questions, remove duplicates, and make sure the wording is clear. Questions already answered by existing research will be logged separately. 

4. Checking against evidence: We will compare the list of questions with existing studies to make sure the priorities are genuinely unanswered. 

5. Survey 2 (Prioritising questions): We will ask people to choose which questions they think are most important. 

6. Final workshop: Patients, carers, and professionals will meet to agree the final Top 10 list of research priorities. 

Why does this matter? 

The final list of priorities will be shared widely with researchers, funders, and policymakers so that future studies focus on what really matters to people living with MLTC and those who support them. We want to make sure that the voices of under-represented groups (for example, people from minority ethnic communities, those with limited digital access, or people living in rural areas) are included throughout. 

Note: The full protocol will be uploaded to the Open Science Framework (OSF), an open-access platform where research documents can be shared publicly.