The Advanced Care Research Centre at the University of Edinburgh is a new £20m interdisciplinary research collaboration aiming to transform later life with person centred integrated care
The vision of the ACRC is to play a vital role in addressing the Grand Challenge of ageing by transformational research that will support the functional ability of people in later life so they can contribute to their own welfare for longer. With fresh and diverse thinking across interdisciplinary perspectives our academy students will work to creatively embed deep understanding, data science, artificial intelligence, assistive technologies and robotics into systems of health and social care supporting the independence, dignity and quality-of-life of people living in their own homes and in supported care environments.
The ACRC Academy will equip future leaders to drive society’s response to the challenges of later life care provision; a problem which is growing in scale, complexity and urgency. Our alumni will become leaders in across a diverse range of pioneering and influential roles in the public, private and third sectors.
This project offers the chance to play an important role in the exciting collaboration between the ACRC and VOICE, a digital platform for public engagement in research.
It is now widely accepted that research-based solutions are much more effective when members of the public are involved in shaping and conducting studies. In addition, the World Health Organisation and the UK’s National Institute for Health Research support meaningful engagement with older people to generate ways of improving the lives of our ageing population.
One way to engage populations in research is through digital platforms. VOICE (www.voice-global.org) is a global leader in this field. But if we are to address diversity and inclusion in engagement, and make it meaningful and effective, any method we employ must reach people from communities not traditionally involved. This study therefore asks what will make older people’s engagement with VOICE (and therefore with ACRC) meaningful, if and how engaged research can indeed reach the people it needs to (e.g., diverse, disadvantaged and/or neglected communities), and how engagement can address inequalities?
By working qualitatively with ACRC research participants (those who are using the VOICE platform, those who are not), the wider VOICE network, the VOICE support and development team, and academic researchers, you will explore the barriers and facilitators to the engagement of older people from diverse and/or neglected communities in ACRC and VOICE, when and why engagement is experienced as meaningful, if and how engagement can help to address inequalities and, more widely, enhance the embedding of knowledge exchange and engagement across ageing/academic research. Your results will help ACRC researchers to be more effective in their engagement, support the future development of VOICE, and contribute to the growing field of digitally facilitated engagement in research.