Reporting of patient and public involvement and engagement (PPIE) in clinical trials published in nursing science journals: a descriptive study.

Patient involvement in research may improve the quality and relevance of the work. The British Medical Journal­one of the top medical research journals in the world­has developed a patient partnership plan. Part of this plan requires papers sent to the journal for publication to include a statement about how patients were involved in the research. If patients were not involved in the research, this should be stated in the paper. Most papers published in the British Medical Journal now include a statement about patient involvement. We wanted to check if nurses were reporting patient involvement in the research they do. We read 89 randomised controlled trials (RCTs) published in 27 general nursing journals. We focused on RCTs because they are widely considered the gold standard for evaluating interventions and therefore are most likely to impact on patient care. Unlike the British Medical Journal, there was no evidence that nursing journals required authors to say how patients were engaged or involved in the research they published. There was no evidence of patient involvement in any of the nursing research articles that we looked at. The implication of our work is that nurse researchers need to be developing ways for effective engagement of patients in all aspects of their research and explaining how they did this in the papers they publish in nursing journals.