Creative piece - The hats we wear

A core principal of primary care and research is to consider patients as people viewing them as a whole. A central element of participatory approaches to research is to work in partnership with people throughout the research process. Bringing together multiple stakeholders as research partners represents an attractive approach to increase the democratisation of academic research and provide a productive generation of knowledge that has the potential to create change. The co-operative inquiry of participatory research raises ethical issues of ownership, confidentiality and power differentials that must be navigated. Identifying these challenges led to me developing this creative enquiry to reflect on the multiple hats that I wear in collaborative work and the blurring of boundaries between roles, including those of academic researchers.    

This creative enquiry will include the image that I developed which is an abstraction of different hats and roles that I wear and the impact this has on me to build relationships with patients, researchers, healthcare professionals and other stakeholders within my work. It is often a priority for patient and public involvement contributors to not be seen as unidimensional as they bring many skills beyond their role as a patient or member of the public. Yet we often do not discuss our own multiple roles and experiences that may shape our thinking (for example being a carer, parent, sibling or patient) or create the explicit space to examine and share this and the influence this might have on partnerships and research. Paradoxically while opening up spaces for discussion to create depth and necessary reflexivity by examining emotional, organisational, project or social discourses around research to create closer partnerships, it may also raise conflicts and challenges which we may not feel equipped to deal with.

This creative piece will provide an interactive space to pose these questions by asking people to identify the different hats they wear and the influence this has on their practice and research by using props of different hats that will be available. People will be asked to write on a whiteboard to depict these roles, take photos and share them online to create a shared dialogue using a Twitter hashtag during the conference. The hashtag will be #sapc-hats.     This piece explores how reflexivity in academic primary care is essential and whilst it is sometimes explicit and formal there may be layers of implicit or less formal roles that can influence our work and the enquiry will give conference participants an opportunity to create a dialogue about how this may affect their practice and research.