Advancing Patient and Community Engagement in Occupational Therapy Research

Abstract

Occupational therapy research has a long and varied history of involving patients, public, and communities in research as advisors, collaborators, and co-researchers. In Canada, funding agencies have expected patients and knowledge users to be research team members for more than a decade, as illustrated in initiatives like the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) Strategy for Patient-Oriented Research (CIHR, 2019). However, the extent to which researchers engage with patient or community partners and the quality of engagement varies. The three of us writing this editorial (one patient researcher and two academic researchers) bring our own experiences with research teams to discuss why patient and community engagement in research matters. We advocate for wider inclusion of patient and community collaborators in research teams, integrating an explicit description of this engagement in the methods section of research reports, and appropriate recognition of contributions from patient and community collaborators, including authorship.