Tongue-twisters - how many P’s is that?

Published on Friday, 27 March 2020

We have a pet hate of any jargon and language that makes it hard to understand exactly what the PRU-MNHC does, so we're trying to be as clear and simple as possible without missing any of the important detail. First off, we feel passionate about our patient and public involvement (what's commonly referred to as PPI) not being just about patients and the public but reflecting what's unique about the research we do. It's about parents, patients and the public, so that's an extra P, making it PPPI. We are hoping not just to involve people in our work but to engage them more broadly via our website and public-facing communications, by finding ways to describe what we do that are a bit more, well, engaging - so that's an extra E.

But it takes about 8 seconds to say parent, patient and public involvement and engagement and 4 seconds alone to say the acronym PPPIE. Plus, once you've said that many Ps in a row your tongue's likely to be twisted. So we have come back to the beginning and are now calling it Public Involvement on our website - knowing that in this shorter acronym, parents, patients and the public are implicitly included, and the important job of 'Engagement' as well as involvement is implicit too.

We've also become a bit allergic to the term 'stakeholder' because it doesn't really feel like plain English to us, so we've gone for 'partner'. If you want to hear more about our public involvement work, you can email us at npeuppi@npeu.ox.ac.uk for more details.