Patients as partners

During a hospital stay (outpatient or inpatient), you will be examined and receive various treatments. During your stay, it is possible that you will come into contact with research projects. This is not just about tests for new drugs or medical products. Researchers are also continuously improving existing treatments and working to improve them.

As a patient or citizen, you can get involved in clinical research in many different ways. You can:

• participate in clinical trials
• make their data and samples collected during treatments available for research
• develop and carry out new research projects as a partner together with researchers and share your experience

As a patient, you know your illness and needs from a different perspective than researchers. By sharing your experience and ideas with researchers as an expert, you can help shape research and make an important contribution to improving treatments. Through this collaboration, you help to design research projects in such a way that they meet your needs and can be implemented well in practice.

This collaboration is called “Patient and Public Involvement”, or PPI for short.