MissAnna Lawrence-Jones

Anna is the Public Involvement Lead at the Institute of Global Health Innovation. Anna works across the IGHI (including the NIHR North West London Patient Safety Research Collaboration (NWL PSRC), the Helix Centre, the Centre for Health Policy and the Fleming Initiative) to support the meaningful involvement of patients, carers and the public in research.

Anna manages the public involvement team at IGHI and leads on developing and delivering the public involvement strategy for the PSRC. She set up the Public Involvement Advisory Board, with researchers, clinicians, public involvement experts and three public partners. It is co-chaired by a public partner, whom also sits on the PSRC Executive and Management Board. Anna established the NWL Community Champions Committee, a diverse group of local community members, who have strong links with under-represented groups. This group advises the researchers how best to interact with different communities and make the opportunities and research more accessible and relevant.

Anna is also the Public Involvement Lead and Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) Lead for the NIHR PSRCs Network (SafetyNet), where she leads a public involvement strategy and an EDI strategy. As part of these strategies she has set up a public involvement network and an EDI network, where leads from across the six PSRCs come together to share knowledge and discuss challenges.

One of Anna’s key roles is to ensure staff across the centres are trained in public involvement and have appropriate support, resources and processes to meaningfully involve the public in their work. Anna is oversaw the public involvement officer to develop the Public Involvement Front Door (www.publicinvolvement.co.uk), a concise, user-friendly and practical resource for researchers to carry out public involvement. Anna has developed a process to capture the impact of public involvement across research projects.

Anna leads the public involvement in several research projects. One example, is working with Mental Health Innovations to involve a diverse group of public members in improving Shout (the crisis text messaging service) and influence research on Shout data. She also led the public involvement for a project to support people to attend hospital appointments, where she worked with designers from Helix and community members to co-design tailored interventions to support under-served groups to attend outpatient appointments.

Anna previously worked as a Research Funding Manager at Cancer Research UK in the Population Research Team. She was on the Funding and Policy stream of the Wellcome Trust's Graduate Development Programme and has worked in various roles including a Research and Policy Officer at the UK Collaborative of Development Sciences. Anna has a degree in Natural Sciences (Molecular Biology and Psychology) from the University of Durham.