Addressing barriers to global multidisciplinary stakeholder inclusivity: Lessons from global orofacial cleft research...

Inclusivity in research priority setting is fundamental to capturing the opinion of all stakeholders in a research area. Globally, experienced healthcare workers often have deep insights that could impactfully shape future research, and a lack of their involvement in formal research and publications could mean that their voices are insufficiently represented. We aimed to modify the well-established Child Health and Nutrition Research Initiative (CHNRI) methodology to address barriers to inclusivity, which are particularly relevant in healthcare that requires highly multidisciplinary care.

This global research priority-setting exercise for orofacial clefts adapted the CHNRI methodology to include research experts, clinicians from multiple disciplines, and non-technical stakeholders (i.e. patients and parents and non-governmental organisations (NGOs)) on a global basis. A multidisciplinary international steering group proposed and discussed methodological changes to improve inclusivity, including survey edits, subgroups for research questions, a demographics section, translation in French and Spanish, phrasing adaptation, and alternative dissemination techniques.

We received 412 responses and 1420 questions, spanning 78 different countries and 18 different specialties/groups. Challenges remain to improve representation of all groups, with the vast majority of answers (30%) being from surgeons and a comparatively small proportion from patient/parent groups (9%). This also includes managing responses in three languages, effective dissemination, and responses that were not worded as research questions.

This is one of the first CHNRI exercises to involve patients and parents, clinicians, and researchers in its first question submission stage, and the first ever to do so on a global scale. We describe our approach to addressing inclusivity challenges and report related demographic data to serve as a benchmark upon which we hope future CHNRI exercises will improve.