Summary
Alleviate Patient Advisory Group member, Irene Soulsby, recently attended the Scottish Research and Innovation Conference. In this article, she shares some reflections on the event.
Alleviate Patient Advisory Group member, Irene Soulsby, recently attended the Scottish Research and Innovation Conference. She has shared some reflections on the event.
‘Attending this conference was a brilliant opportunity. It was absolutely heaving with participants. I was hoping to speak to some of the attendees about being a Patient Partner and about Alleviate and that’s what I did during the breaks.
There were many posters on show and I was very pleased to see that Alleviate had an interactive poster screen! There was a great conference brochure and I think some videos and slides have been posted online.
I was interested to see that the Good Medical Practice Report Good medical practice 2024 – GMC (gmc-uk.org) stated that patients should be informed by their doctors if they’re aware of opportunities for them to participate in research, as that is perhaps not always happening for those of us living with pain.
Some of the conference focused on Artificial Intelligence and the possibilities within medicine. It made me think that there’s a need to turn things around a bit in the media, so we’re talking about the risks of not using AI, as much as the potential risks of using it.
We heard about future health risks and how much need there is for solid data to plan and for problems, which could include an increase in the number of people living with pain. It was interesting to consider the tension between the need for data and Information Governance that protects people’s privacy. It seems like we need to build trust between the public and researchers by being transparent and ensuring the public interest is always held at the centre of the research.
There were presentations about the rise of chronic disease and comorbidity and about Post Covid chronic pain as an emerging issue.
One of the messages was that the big problems of today and the future can’t be solved by one discipline alone. I thought it would have been accurate to also say that they can’t be solved by the medical professions alone and need input from people living with conditions.’
The Alleviate Pain Data Hub is a £2M collaborative project funded by a consortium of funders including Versus Arthritis and the UK Medical Research Council. The project is led by the University of Dundee and involves partners from across the UK. Alleviate is one of nine HDR UK Health Data Research Hubs.
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