Partnership in Practice

Co-produced monthly series published in BMJ Opinion

Read the full series here.

Aim: Increasingly health professionals are working with patients, carers, patient advocates, and civil society organisations to improve the quality, safety, and sustainability of healthcare. The BMJ's Partnership in Practice series is a co produced series of readable narratives which draw attention to innovative collaborative "partnership" initiatives in clinical practice, service design and delivery, policy making, medical education and health research

It seeks to raise awareness, stimulate debate, and help spread good practice on the "science and art" of working in partnership with patients and the public in different healthcare settings and in different countries. We are particularly keen to look at innovative projects in frontline care and present these in a stimulating and readable way. Articles should not only describe projects. They should also include critical assessment of the challenges in implementing them and some information on impact/outcomes. This does not have to be in the form of formal research, for the series is keen to draw attention to initiatives at a relatively early stage.

Authorship: The experience and views of all partners must be presented

(a) the lead clinicians, managers, and/ or other health professionals involved

(b) the lead patients, carers, patient advocates, community organisations etc who have co led or been involved with the project.

Viewpoints (and more than two can be included) should appear sequentially, in a single article of around 1250 -1500 words and up to 5 references.

Guidance on what to cover

1.Rationale, aim, scope of project

2. Design: how was the joint initiative/ project set up and why, and who did you decide who to include and work with?

3. Implementation: how does it /did it work in practice/ how are decisions made? What challenges have been faced by patient and public partners and health professionals during this project and how were they resolved (or not)? Were there any unexpected issues, good or bad? What were the light bulb moments which helped move the project forward?

4. Evaluation/impact: did you collect any formal data/results? Give a brief description of impact/insights and what processes or services have changed as the result of the project from health professional/service/hospital/patients and carers, public's viewpoint. Linked material, case studies can be included.

5. Learning points: what worked/what was difficult/ or did not work? Draw out messages on what to do - and what to avoid doing, if you want to achieve change and make a joint project of this nature work well.

6. Future directions: what's next for this initiative?

7. Key messages: please pull out 2-3 key "take home" messages from your article and flag any short pieces that you regard to be" key quotes" from the piece.

8. Illustrations/ photos: Please include photos of each author and a twitter handle if you have one. In addition we welcome the opportunity to consider 1 -2 illustrations, short video or audio clips, but not detailed graphs and tables.

9. COI statements: As well as the article, we ask authors to complete a competing interests statement, even if there's nothing to declare. Here's more on this (http://bit.ly/1nwvs0Q).

Editorial oversight : Tessa Richards (trichards@bmj.com) and Juliet Dobson (jdobson@bmj.com) Questions about the series and possible contributions should be sent to Tessa Richards. Publication is dependent on articles going successfully through our internal editorial review processes.