How to collaboratively identify and meaningfully respond to the challenges of patient & service user partnership in healthcare services

Background: Co-producing services with diverse patients, service users and communities is key to ensuring that services are designed around what matters to people and their communities.

In order to embed partnership with patients and service users into health care service delivery, Ireland's national Health Services Executive (HSE) is resourcing patient and service user engagement and leadership through Irish health service policy.

In July 2025, participatory consultations were independently facilitated in the six regional health service regions to guide future patient and service user partnership, strategy, and priorities.

This workshop will facilitate international participants as service users, caregivers, service providers, researchers or policy makers to consider the key thematic findings on exemplars, challenges and solutions to patient & service user engagement from their own lived perspectives .

The participatory workshop and discussion aims to generate practical, transferable solutions to the range of challenges involved in integrating meaningful patient partnerships into diverse health systems.

Audience: We invite patients, caregivers, clinicians, health providers, managers, and policy makers to joithe roundtable and full room dialogue. Diverse perspectives will help strengthen partnership in health service collaborative design, delivery, evaluation and ultimately improvement in integrated care.

Approach: This interactive workshop will facilitate participation and collaboration. We will first briefly review qualitative priorities from Ireland's regional consultations on patient and service user engagement. We will then use the ‘Ketso’ roundtable kit for group discussions on solutions to the challenges inherent to integrating patient and service user engagement into health systems.

Each roundtable will be led by a HSE Regional Lead for Patient and Service User Engagement staff member or an experienced patient partner involved in Ireland's Patient & Service User Engagement initiative.

Outcomes: Participants will collaboratively learn about and further develop strategies for addressing the challenges associated with integrating patient and service user engagement across various health systems. Participants will collectively use the 'Ketso' toolkit to reflect, discuss and vote on ideas which is a participatory approach that may be applicable in their own settings.

The session offers networking with patient and health service leaders in patient engagement and will generate diverse, transferable insights on how to embed service user partnership into health service design, delivery, evaluation, and improvement.

Below is the proposed workshop schedule & activity duration - estimated for 60 minutes (with additional 90 minute timings in brackets):

Activity 1: Networking/warm up exercise (10 mins)

Activity 2: Presentation on context of patient & service user partnership in HSE - 5 mins

Activity 3: Presentation of thematic findings from regional participatory workshops on patient and service user engagement – 10 mins

Activity 4: Audience Participation through facilitated roundtable discussion using Ketso kit – 30 mins (or 40)

Activity 5: Facilitated roundtable feedback to full room – 10 mins (or 20)

Activity 6: Closing comments – 5 mins