Community Inclusion and Engagement (CIE)

Our Community Inclusion and Engagement (CIE) approach ensures that the voices of healthcare staff, patients, carers, and community members are central to everything we do.

We have two CIE panels – one made up of healthcare staff, and one of patients, carers and members of the public. These groups provide ongoing advice, feedback, and direction throughout the Partnership. They help shape our research questions, guide how we design and deliver studies, and ensure that our findings are useful and accessible to those most affected by workforce challenges.

CIE panel members also help us make decisions about where to focus our efforts, what matters most in terms of staff and patient wellbeing, and how best to share what we learn. Their insights ensure our work is rooted in real-world experience.

You can find out more about what it means to be involved on our:

Staff page
Patient and Public page
Opportunities to get involved

The PARTNER Framework

Workforce Voices has developed a practical governance framework for establishing and sustaining CIE panels which we have termed the “PARTNER framework”. It was developed from our experience of establishing the Workforce Voices staff and patient/public panels and is intended as a practical resource that others can adapt to their own programmes.

Alongside the framework, we’ve included a range of freely available templates and practical tools, including examples from our terms of reference, contributor agreements, training needs assessments, recruitment strategies, and impact registers that teams are welcome to adapt for their own projects.

The framework is available as an open-access paper published in a health professions education research journal but we believe there are transferable insights here that may be of interest to anyone who is working in or with CIE.

Find the framework here