Folk.us

We need you to get involved to make research into health and social care relevant, radical and really really useful

Folk.us will work to support and develop patient, service user and carer involvement in health and social care research activities to ensure that those who use services and those who care for those who use services inform and guide research at all stages.

The Folk.us aim remains the same and we retain our status as a 'unique programme', ie there is no other programme that undertakes the work we do. Folk.us supports grassroots involvement in research, the development of policies and strategies for research organisations about involvement and supports services users, patients and carers to be involved with existing research structures; Folk.us explicitly seeks to give agency for service users, patients and carers to collaboratively develop their own research which is rigorous and credible as peer reviewed research.

The role of Folk.us

The main role of Folk.us is to support patients, service users and carers to design and undertake their own research across a health or social care issues that are important to them. This means we take a small number of research ideas from patients, service users and carers' suggestions and work with them to develop these ideas into full, credible and rigorous research proposals.

The aim is that the patient-, service user- and carer-led research proposals are presented to funders for consideration and, if successful in obtaining funding, Folk.us then continues to support the patients, service users and carers in working on the research projects.

Many research funders wish to support patient-, service user- and carer-led research projects and it is our aim to make this easier for everyone involved by being a dedicated source of support for developing these applications and projects.

Our most recent project has been Past Carers, a narrative research project on carer bereavement. This was a carer-led project involving 8 carers, supported by technical experts, to undertake digital storytelling, interviewing, analysis, write up and dissemination.  View the digital stories on Youtube. You can also read a summary of the research project as well as the full report. A number of articles on the project are available here.

Folk.us is hosted by and is part of the University of Exeter Medical School.

Folk.us is currently supporting two research projects as part of the Folk.us-PenCLAHRC Awards. One project is groundwork starting with a literature review about how patients are supported with 'self care management' in primary care; the second is a project investigating the support available to women with alcohol issues. Both projects are led by service users.

To have a look some of our other projects, past and present, please visit the 'Our Work' section of the website.