Patient Involvement

This book chapter is forthcoming in the book Multi-Species Dementia Studies: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach, edited by Nick Jenkins, Anna Jack-Waugh, and Louise Ritchie, from Bristol University Press. The chapter brings work by Davies and Gorman’s on how patient representatives review research proposals that use animal models in dementia research with Richard Milne’s work on the emergence, development, and ‘calibration’ of animal models over the last 40 years of Alzheimer’s research. Bringing these projects together enables us to explore how multispecies relations are made in Alzheimer's research, and how people affected by dementia are placed in several ways through these processes, only some of which they are aware of and thus able to affect.

This book features highlights from the Animal Research Nexus Programme to demonstrates how the humanities and social sciences can contribute to understanding what is created through animal procedures - including constitutional forms of research governance, different institutional cultures of care, the professional careers of scientists and veterinarians, collaborations with patients and publics, and research animals, specially bred for experiments or surplus to requirements.

Developing the idea of the animal research nexus, this book explores how connections and disconnections are made between these different elements, how these have reshaped each other historically, and how they configure the current practice and policy of UK animal research.

This report contributes to a growing body of advice around how to involve people affected by health conditions in laboratory or biomedical research. It draws on work completed as part of the Animal Research Nexus Programme (2017-2023) and brings together our findings with resources to help people who might be involved in conversations around the use of animals in laboratory research in the UK.

A good culture of care, empowering individuals within organisations to care and reflecting wider social expectations about care, is now a well-documented aspiration in managing practices of laboratory animal research and establishing priorities for patient and public health. However, there is little attention to how different institutional cultures of care interact and what happens to the accountabilities of caring roles and the entanglements of caring practices when institutional cultures meet.

Part of the Animal Research Nexus programme involves exploring the changing relationships between people affected by different health conditions and animal research. Our new chapter explores how ‘patient voices’ are represented around animal research. And we’ve made it into a graphic abstract...

Part of the Animal Research Nexus programme involves exploring the changing relationships between people affected by different health conditions and animal research. This chapter explores how ‘patient voices’ are represented around animal research.