Planning the Evaluation of Patient Engagement in the PriCare Research Program

The involvement of patients, their families, or their representatives is becoming increasingly common in health-care research. However, theoretical justifcation of patient engagement (PE) and consistent guidance on how to include patients as key stakeholders on research teams are still lacking. This paper describes how the Pri-Care group integrates PE into its program’s governance structure and uses a program logic perspective to engage patients in the planning phases of a research study based on resources, processes, and relationships, guided by the SPOR CIHR’s PE framework. The PriCare approach facilitates the evaluation and continuous improvement of PE