Engaging diverse patients in a diverse world: the development and preliminary evaluation of educational modules to support diversity in patient engagement research.

Patient-Oriented research (POR) recognizes patients as partners in the research process, contributing valuable knowledge and lived experience to improve health outcomes and research translation. Unfortunately, POR presently does not represent all patients: patient partners involved in research tend to be white, middle-class women. Limited diversity in POR may limit research impact, in part because health research is not fully inclusive of the people requiring healthcare services and support. Although they recognize the need for diversity, many health researchers do not understand how to foster this. To empower health researchers with tools and knowledge to foster diversity in POR, we coordinated teams that co-created a set of educational modules. These teams included academic researchers and patient partners from seldom-heard communities in health research. The modules were built using the Tapestry Tool, an interactive, educational platform. We evaluated the modules using online surveys of 74 health researchers for three things: quality of module content, how engaging they were, and how they impacted health researchers' views on diversity in POR. Our results show that the modules' content was high quality and engaging. After viewing the modules, health researchers were more likely to feel like they had a role in engaging with more diverse people in their research, and felt that they had the tools, knowledge, and ability to do so. Education and knowledge for health researchers are a first step to increasing diversity in POR settings, but systemic barriers to inclusion also need attention.